Clearview AI

In May 2022, the ACLU won a landmark settlement under Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) that permanently banned Clearview AI from making its facial database available to most businesses and private entities nationwide. Clearview was also barred from selling to any Illinois entity, including police, for five years. The suit was the first to focus on harm to survivors of domestic violence, undocumented immigrants, and communities of color. A separate 2025 class-action settlement granted class members a 23% equity stake in Clearview AI, valued at ~$52 million.

Multiple European data protection authorities fined Clearview AI for illegal processing of biometric data under GDPR. France's CNIL fined Clearview €20 million in October 2022 and an additional €5.2 million for non-compliance in 2024. Italy's Garante fined €20 million in March 2022. The UK ICO initially fined £7.5 million (later upheld on appeal in October 2025). Greece fined €20 million. Australia found Clearview breached privacy law but imposed no fine. As of late 2025, Clearview had not paid most international fines, and noyb filed criminal charges in Austria against the company and its executives.

Clearview AI sold its facial recognition technology to over 3,100 US agencies including the FBI (contract signed December 2021), ICE ($2.3M contract for immigration enforcement), NYPD (11,000+ searches), and hundreds of local police departments. The company specifically marketed its use for immigration enforcement under ICE's ImmigrationOS system. CEO Hoan Ton-That actively pursued federal expansion, telling Reuters in 2022 the company would 'redouble its efforts' to convert trial users to permanent customers.

Clearview AI built a facial recognition database of over 60 billion facial images by scraping photographs from social media platforms, news websites, Venmo, and other publicly accessible online sources — all without the knowledge or consent of the people depicted. The database grows by approximately 75 million images daily. Users can upload a photo and receive links to everywhere that face appears online, enabling identification of virtually anyone from a single photograph.

Clearview AI's facial recognition technology was linked to wrongful arrests where police relied on erroneous facial matches with minimal additional investigation. Robert Williams of Detroit was arrested for larceny in January 2020 despite never having stolen anything — identified solely by the facial recognition system. NYT reporter Kashmir Hill documented multiple cases of flawed results leading to privacy-eroding and false arrests by law enforcement agencies. The cases disproportionately affected people of color due to documented racial bias in facial recognition technology.