AI firm Clearview hit with Austrian criminal complaint

VIENNA (AFP) — An Austrian data privacy group said on Tuesday it had filed a criminal complaint aiming to hold the executives of U.S. firm Clearview AI liable for illegally amassing a database of billions of photos of faces.

Clearview AI scrapes images of faces from the internet without asking permission and sells access to clients including law enforcement agencies.

Several EU privacy regulators have already fined and banned the firm for violating the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation, which controls how data is collected and used in Europe.

Campaign group Noyb (None of Your Business) filed the complaint, hoping Austrian prosecutors would now hold Clearview AI’s leadership personally liable and even send them to jail.

In its complaint, Noyb accuses Clearview AI of “simply ignoring” the sanctions imposed by EU data protection authorities, adding that a lack of enforcement had allowed the U.S. firm to “effectively dodge” the GDPR.

Privacy watchdogs in France, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands have all hit Clearview with fines totaling more than 100 million euros ($116 million) in recent years.

Regulators in Germany and Austria have declared the firm’s practices illegal.

Noyb said it hoped its complaint would spur Austrian prosecutors to “take action when the personal data of billions of people was stolen — as has been confirmed by multiple authorities.”

“If successful, Clearview AI and its executives could face jail time and be held personally liable, in particular if travelling to Europe,” Noyb said.

Clearview AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP and has not generally spoken publicly about the sanctions it has faced from regulators.

However, when France fined the firm in 2022 its boss Hoan Ton-That said the company had no clients or premises in France and was not subject to EU privacy law.

Noyb has launched several legal cases against U.S. technology giants such as Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram and Google, often prompting action from regulatory authorities over GDPR breaches.

It has filed more than 800 complaints in various jurisdictions on behalf of internet users.

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By Agence France-Presse