Clearview Stole My Face and the EU Can’t Do Anything About It

Matthias Marx says his face has been stolen. The German activist’s visage is pale and wide, topped with messy, blond hair. So far, these features have been mapped and monetized by three companies without his permission. As has happened to billions of others, his face has been turned into a search term without his consent.

In 2020 Marx read about Clearview AI, a company that says it has scraped billions of photos from the internet to create a huge database of faces. By uploading a single photo, Clearview’s clients, which include law enforcement agencies, can use the company’s facial recognition technology to unearth other online photos featuring the same face. Marx wanted to know if the company had any photos of his face in its database, so he emailed Clearview to ask. A month later, he received a reply with two screenshots attached. The pictures were around a decade old but both showed Marx, looking fresh faced in a blue T-shirt, taking part in a Google competition for engineers. Marx knew the pictures existed. But unlike Clearview, he did not know a photographer was selling them on stock photo website Alamy without his permission.

Marx says Clearview’s revelation was a wake-up call. “I’m no longer in control of what people do with my data,” he says. To him, it was obvious that Clearview was violating Europe’s privacy law, the GDPR, by using his face, or biometric data, without his knowledge or permission. So in February 2020 he filed a complaint with his local privacy regulator in Hamburg. That complaint was the first filed against Clearview in Europe, but it’s still unclear whether the case has been resolved. A spokesperson for the regulator told WIRED that the case had been closed, but Marx says he has not been notified of the outcome. “It’s almost been two and a half years since I complained about ClearView AI, and the case is still open,” says Marx, who works as a security researcher at the IT security company Security Research Labs. “That is too slow, even if you take into account that it’s the first case of its kind.”