A May 2022 settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union left facial-recognition company Clearview AI “permanently banned, nationwide, from making its faceprint database available to most businesses and other private actors.” Clearview had built that database by scraping billions of photos from the public web.
The settlement resolved a suit, ACLU v. Clearview AI, brought under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which requires companies to obtain written consent before collecting a person’s biometric identifier. Clearview also agreed to stop selling access to any entity in Illinois, including police, for five years, and to let Illinois residents opt out. See 2022-clearview-aclu-settlement.