General Intelligence

Clearview AI Is Taking Facial Recognition Privacy to the Supreme Court

International regulators have found Clearview AI’s technology breaches their privacy laws

Dave Gershgorn
OneZero
Published in
2 min readFeb 26, 2021

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Illustration. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.

Clearview AI plans to challenge an Illinois law guarding against private facial recognition databases in the Supreme Court, according to Bloomberg Law.

The Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has been a thorn in the side of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple for years, as it prohibits the collection of data like facial recognition images, fingerprints, and iris scans without explicit consent. Workers at conglomerate Del Monte Foods even used the law to challenge a facial recognition time-clock system.

Clearview AI claims that previous interpretations of BIPA are “need of clarification from the Supreme Court, as lower courts have struggled to identify consistent rules or standards.”

Under the state law, Clearview AI would have to prove that its service did not cause a “concrete and particularized injury-in-fact” in order to operate in the state.

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Dave Gershgorn
OneZero

Senior Writer at OneZero covering surveillance, facial recognition, DIY tech, and artificial intelligence. Previously: Qz, PopSci, and NYTimes.