Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

TECHNOLOGY

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.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

French barber still trimming at 90

“I love this job, it’s in my bones,” the 90 year old said, leaning on one of his cast-iron barber’s chairs from the 1940s.

“And despite my age, my hands still don’t shake.”

Even with arthritis, he is on his feet from Tuesday to Saturday, tending to his customers’ hair and beards in his shop in the small southern town of Saint-Girons, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

“I would have liked to retire at 60, but my wife was sick and I needed to pay for the care home,” he said, which cost more than €2,000 a month.

Even after his wife died in January, he kept going to work to stave off sad thoughts.

“I’m not grumpy getting up [to go to work],” he said.

France’s national hairdressers’ union believes Amilhastre may be the country’s oldest active barber.

“We have a few who continue late in life, but 90 years old is exceptional,” union president Christophe Dore told AFP.

“I’m not sure if he is France’s oldest barber, but if not, he can’t be far off.”

According to national statistics institute INSEE, a little more than half a million people over 65 still work in France.

In the southern region of Occitanie, where Amilhastre lives, only 1.65 percent of people older than 70 years old still work, including 190 79-year-olds. But statistics do not go beyond that age.

Many of Amilhastre’s customers call him Achille, after his father who founded the barber’s shop in 1932, giving it his name and then teaching his son the profession.

The shop witnessed the German occupation of France during World War II.

“During the war, German police came to find my father to groom a captain who had broken his leg,” Amilhastre said.

German troops had taken over a large stately home in town called Beauregard.

“We were scared because they used to say that anyone who went up to Beauregard never came back,” he said. “Luckily, he did.”

He said he remembered a “tough period” for businesses when he first picked up the scissors in 1947.

But then the town rebounded, he said, with its men following a flurry of new hair trends from greased quiffs in the 1950s, to 1970s bowl cuts.

The barber’s shop survived an economic downturn as local paper mills closed in the 1980s sparking mass layoffs, and supermarkets pushed small shops out of business.

“People started looking for work further afield, so we had to adapt and stay open later in the evening,” Amilhastre said.

That same decade, the Aids epidemic worried customers, who understood little about the illness at the time.

“People were scared,” Amilhastre said. “They no longer asked to be shaved and when we did, we were petrified there’d be a cut, that someone would bleed and the virus would be passed on to the next customer.”

Jean-Louis Surre, 67, runs the nearby cafe where Amilhastre once taught him to play billiards as a young boy.

Behind his bar, Surre said he remembered his mother taking him across the road to see Amilhastre for a haircut every month as a child.

“He’d pump up the chair to reach the mirror, use his clippers and then at the end perfume you with some cologne – you know, squeezing those little pumps,” he said.

He is one of several older customers to regularly drop by Achille’s – even just to read the newspaper or have a chat.

Inside the barber’s, Jean Laffitte, a balding 84-year-old, said he no longer really needed a haircut. “With what little is left up there, these days I come out of friendship,” he said.

Url copied to clipboard!