US Web-Scraping Company Will Appeal ICO Enforcement Win
A U.S.-based company that scraps the web for images of people and sells them to clients tells Privacy Daily it will appeal a Wednesday decision from a U.K. panel that ruled its activities violate its citizens' privacy.
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The U.K. Upper Tribunal (UT) upheld an enforcement action against New York-based Clearview AI for unlawfully scraping images of U.K. residents from the web and social media and putting them on its global online database, where Clearview customers could use them. U.K. privacy watchdog ICO made the announcement.
The tribunal system consists of legal panels that handle cases in several specialized areas.
Clearview AI describes itself as a company that "uses facial recognition to help law enforcement identify suspects, witnesses, and victims."
In its note to us, Clearview AI Chief Legal Officer Jack Mulcaire wrote the company is "disappointed by the ruling which misapplied the law to improperly seek to regulate how American companies serve the US government." Clearview doesn't offer any product or do any business in the U.K., he added.
In its announcement, the ICO said the UT's decision reaffirms that companies that want to monitor the behavior of U.K. residents are subject to the country's data protection law, regardless of where the companies are based.
"It is essential that foreign organisations are held accountable when their technologies impact the information rights and freedom of individuals in the U.K.," wrote Information Commissioner John Edwards.
In May 2022, the ICO fined Clearview AI 7.5 million pounds ($10.1 million) for web scraping, noting that it not only enabled identification of people but also monitored their behavior as a commercial service.
Clearview AI appealed the fine and enforcement notice to the First-tier Tribunal (FTT), and the ICO appealed that decision to the UT.
The UT found that Clearview AI's processing of personal information related to monitoring the behavior of U.K. residents, and that the processing didn't fall outside the reach of Britain's data protection law simply because Clearview provides services to foreign law enforcement and government agencies.
The UT also said that the FTT misapplied the law in finding that Clearview AI's processing of personal information fell outside the scope of the U.K. GDPR.