- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.de
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.de
"A company which enables its clients to search a database of billions of images scraped from the internet for matches to a particular face has won an appeal against the UK’s privacy watchdog.
Last year, Clearview AI was fined more than £7.5m by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for unlawfully storing facial images.
Privacy International (who helped bring the original case I believe) responded to this on Mastodon:
"The first 33 pages of the judgment explain with great detail and clarity why Clearview falls squarely within the bounds of GDPR. Clearview’s activities are entirely “related to the monitoring of behaviour” of UK data subjects.
In essence, what Clearview does is large-scale processing of a highly intrusive nature. That, the Tribunal agreed.
BUT in the last 2 pages the Tribunal tells us that because Clearview only sells to foreign governments, it doesn’t fall under UK GDPR jurisdiction.
So Clearview would have been subject to GDPR if it sold its services to UK police or government authorities or commercial entities, but because it doesn’t, it can do whatever the hell it wants with UK people’s data - this is at best puzzling, at worst nonsensical."
I’ll tell you what’s even more frustrating and annoying: when you discuss those topics on a privacy-oriented forum and a bunch of buttmunches downvote you. It happens to me here and it happens on all the other forums I patronize where I discuss these things. And I’m pretty sure the downvoters are members of the newer generations who have grown up with zero privacy and never experienced it, don’t know what it should be and what they’re missing, for whom corporate surveillance is normal and we old farts are raving lunatics.
I don’t care about the silly forum points, but seeing people dismiss what you say without even attempting to argue because it doesn’t fit their warped normality, that’s fucking frustrating and really depressing for the future.