The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois is suing a facial recognition aggregator capable of scraping billions of publicly available faces and matching them to search queries from law enforcement.
The lawsuit the ACLU filed in Cook County Court Thursday alleges Clearview AI secretly takes the visual data of subjects from places like Facebook, Twitter and other online sources that give a clear vision of a subject’s face, then makes the data available to law enforcement to reference, a violation of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act.
“Clearview has violated and continues to violate the BIPA rights of Plaintiffs’ members, clients, and program participants and other Illinois residents at staggering scale,” the complaint reads.
Using facial recognition technology, the filing says, Clearview has captured more than three billion faceprints from images available online, all without the knowledge and consent of those pictured.
Instead of seeking the $1,000 fine per instance of a proven breach of BIPA, the ACLU is seeking a judge to order it cease the collection of facial data from those who would be under the jurisdiction of the Illinois law.
Clearview’s attorney, Tor Eckland, wasn’t available to comment on the lawsuit but told CNN Business it’s absurd that “ACLU wants to censor which search engines people can use to access public information on the internet. The First Amendment forbids this.”
The ACLU and other privacy advocates point to companies like Clearview as the reason for every state to adopt laws similar to BIPA.
“Clearview is violating the privacy rights of Illinois residents at a staggering scale,” said Rebecca Greenberg, senior staff counsel with the ACLU of Illinois. “Clearview’s practices are exactly the kind of threat to privacy that the Illinois legislature intended to address through BIPA, and demonstrate why states across the country should adopt legal protections like the ones in Illinois.”
The technology represents an especially potent tool in catching sex workers, who have a representative body joining the lawsuit.
“As members of a criminalized population and profession who additionally battle social stigma and economic marginalization, sex workers’ ability to maintain anonymity is crucial to personal safety both on and off the job,” said Kathryn Rosenfeld, a member of the Sex Workers Outreach Project-Chicago Leadership Board. “Sex workers are already extremely vulnerable to violence and persecution by law enforcement, clientele, would-be economic exploiters, and members of the general public. The ability of these individuals to track and target us using facial recognition technology further threatens our community’s ability to earn our livelihoods safely.”
