The facial recognition company that everyone – or at least a large chunk of everyone – loves to hate, Clearview AI, is to get yet another day, and perhaps very much longer than that, in a Chicago courtroom.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), together with four community organisations based in the US state of Illinois, has brought a civil suit that states as its purpose to “put a stop to [Clearview’s] unlawful surreptitious capture and storage of millions of Illinoisans’ sensitive biometric identifiers”, and to “to remedy an extraordinary and unprecedented violation of Illinois residents’ privacy rights”.
Clearview already faced a class-action lawsuit filed in January, also in Illinois, for collecting biometric identifiers without consent.
Illinois is home not only to Chicago, the third-biggest metropolis in the US, but also to a state law called BIPA, short for Biometric Information Privacy Act, which legislates the USA’s strictest legal control over the collection and use of biometric data.