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France slaps fine on face recognition firm Clearview AI

France on Thursday slapped a €20-million fine on US firm Clearview AI for breaching privacy laws, as pressure mounts on the controversial facial-recognition platform.

Published: 20 October 2022 16:16 CEST

France slaps fine on face recognition firm Clearview AI

The logo of France's information technology watchdog, the National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties (CNIL)(Photo by Eric PIERMONT / AFP)

The company collects images of faces from websites and social media feeds without seeking permission and sells access to its vast database — reportedly around 20 billion pictures — to clients including law enforcement agencies.

Privacy activists around the world have raised objections to the business model, already winning a case in the United States that has forced the firm to stop selling its main database to private clients.

The French complaint to French privacy watchdog CNIL is one of a slew filed by activists across Europe that has already resulted in fines in Italy and Britain.

CNIL ruled last year that Clearview was processing personal data unlawfully and ordered it to stop, but said on Thursday that the firm had not responded.

In addition to the €20-million fine, CNIL once again ordered the firm to stop collecting data from people residing in France and
delete the data it had already collected.

The watchdog said there were “very serious risks to the fundamental rights of the data subjects” and gave the firm two months to comply or begin incurring fines of €100,000 per day.

Clearview boss Hoan Ton-That said in statements emailed to AFP that his company had no clients or premises in France and was not subject to EU privacy law, adding that his firm collected “public data from the open internet” and complied with all standards of privacy.

“There is no way to determine if a person has French citizenship purely from a public photo from the internet, and therefore it is impossible to delete data from French residents,” he added.

Clearview was formed five years ago and has since attracted almost $40 million in funding from investors including prominent Silicon Valley conservative Peter Thiel, according to the Crunchbase website.

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Flights resume after global IT crash wreaks havoc

Passenger crowds had swelled at airports on Friday as dozens of flights were cancelled after an update to a programme operating on Microsoft Windows crashed systems worldwide.

By Saturday, officials said the situation had returned virtually to normal in airports across Germany and France, as Paris prepared to welcome millions for the Olympic Games starting on Friday.

Multiple US airlines and airports across Asia said they had resumed operations, with check-in services restored in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand, and mostly back to normal in India, Indonesia and at Singapore’s Changi Airport as of Saturday afternoon.

CrowdStrike apologises

Microsoft estimated Saturday that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected in the global IT crash, adding that the number amounted to less than one percent of all Windows machines.

READ ALSO: Air passengers ‘in limbo’ as global IT crash grounds flights

“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services”, it said.

Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, affecting Windows users running the CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software.

In a Saturday blog post, CrowdStrike said it had released an update on Thursday night that had caused a system crash and the infamous “blue screen of death” fatal error message.

CrowdStrike said it had rolled out a fix for the problem, and the company’s boss, George Kurtz, told US news channel CNBC he wanted to “personally apologise to every organisation, every group and every person who has been impacted”.

The company also said it could take a few days for things to fully get back to normal.

Britain’s National Health Service was hobbled by the crash on Friday, preventing doctors from accessing patient records and booking appointments.

A “majority of systems… are now coming back online in most areas, however they are still running slightly slower than usual”, an NHS spokesperson said, warning of disruption continuing into next week.

READ MORE: Global IT glitch starts to cause travel chaos in Spain

Media companies were also hit, with Britain’s Sky News saying the glitch had ended its Friday morning news broadcasts. Australia’s ABC also reported major difficulties.

Australian, British and German authorities warned of an increase in scam and phishing attempts following the outage, including people offering to help reboot computers and asking for personal information or credit card details.

Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported issues with their digital services, some mobile phone carriers were disrupted and customer services in a number of companies went down.

“The scale of this outage is unprecedented, and will no doubt go down in history,” said Junade Ali of Britain’s Institution of Engineering and Technology, adding that the last incident approaching the same scale was in 2017.

Flight chaos

While some airports halted all flights, in others airline staff resorted to manual check-ins for passengers, leading to long lines and frustrated travellers.

Thousands of US flights were grounded, although airlines later said they were re-establishing their services and working through the backlog.

A senior US administration official said Friday that “our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although some congestion remains”.

India’s largest airline Indigo said Saturday that operations had been “resolved”, adding in a statement on X that the process of resuming normal operations would “extend into the weekend”.

Low-cost carrier AirAsia said it was still trying to get back online and had been “working around the clock towards recovering its departure control systems”.

Chinese state media said Beijing’s airports had not been affected.

‘Common cause’

Companies were left patching up their systems and trying to assess the damage, even as officials tried to tamp down panic by ruling out foul play.

According to CrowdStrike’s Saturday blog, the issue was “not the result of or related to a cyberattack”.

Although CrowdStrike had rolled out a fix, many experts questioned the ease of such a process.

“While experienced users can implement the workaround, expecting millions to do so is impractical,” said Oli Buckley, a professor at Britain’s Loughborough University.

Other experts said the incident should prompt a widespread reconsideration of how reliant societies are on a handful of tech companies.

“We need to be aware that such software can be a common cause of failure for multiple systems at the same time,” said John McDermid, a professor at York University in Britain.

Infrastructure should be designed “to be resilient against such common cause problems”, he added.

For more detailed country specific information, head to the homepage for The Local France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway or Denmark.

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