The Dutch data protection watchdog on Tuesday fined facial recognition startup Clearview AI 30.5 million euros ($33.7 million) for creating what it called an “illegal database” of billions of facial photos.
The Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) also warned Dutch companies that using Clearview’s services is also prohibited.
The New York-based company did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. The data agency said Clearview “has not contested this decision and therefore cannot appeal the fine.”
The agency said that the creation of the database and the failure to provide full information to those whose images appeared in the database constituted a serious breach of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
“Facial recognition is a highly invasive technology that you cannot arbitrarily apply to anyone in the world,” DPA President Aleid Wolfsen said in a statement.
“If there’s a picture of you on the internet — and doesn’t that apply to all of us? — you can end up in Clearview’s database and be tracked. This is not some tragic scenario from a horror movie. It’s not something that could only happen in China,” he said.
The DPA said that if Clearview fails to end its regulatory violations, the company will face non-compliance fines of up to 5.1 million euros ($5.6 million) in addition to the fine.
In June, Clearview reached a settlement in an Illinois lawsuit alleging that its massive collection of facial photos violated the privacy of subjects, a settlement that lawyers estimated could be worth more than $50 million. Clearview did not admit any liability as part of the settlement.
The Illinois lawsuit consolidates lawsuits from across the United States against Clearview, a company that scraped photos from social media and elsewhere on the internet to create databases and sell them to businesses, individuals and government agencies.
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