Clearview AI Inc.’s facial recognition technology has been subject to regulatory scrutiny from the privacy sector worldwide, including the UK Information Commissioner who issued the US company with monetary penalty and enforcement notices (the Notices) for alleged violations of GDPR/UK GDPR (the Regulations).

In a judgment dated October 17, 2023 (the Judgment), the UK’s First-tier Tribunal (FTT) (being the first level of regulatory appeals) upheld, on jurisdictional grounds, Clearview’s appeal of the Notices. The Commissioner sought permission to appeal on November 17, 2023. This blog piece is a reduced version of our wider commentary on the case, which is available here.

Background

Clearview is a US company providing facial recognition services to criminal law enforcement and national security agencies (and/or their contractors) outside of the United Kingdom and the European Union. In short, Clearview collects publicly available images of faces from the internet, which are compiled into a database (the Database). Clearview’s software then creates a mathematical ‘vector’ of those faces, such that they can be indexed and searched against. Clearview’s clients are able to upload their own images onto their private Clearview platform and compare those images against the Database. Clearview’s algorithmic software will return images of sufficient

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