AIPolicyTracker
Menu

AI incident #412 ·

Finnish Police Were Reportedly Reprimanded After National Bureau of Investigation Unit Allegedly Used Clearview AI to Identify Potential Abuse Victims

Open on the AI Incident Database 4 news reports Synced from the AIID API · record last edited 3 Sep 2026

What happened

Finland's Deputy Data Protection Ombudsman reportedly reprimanded the National Police Board after a National Bureau of Investigation child sexual exploitation unit allegedly used Clearview AI in late 2019 or early 2020 to identify potential child sexual abuse victims. Four NBI users reportedly made about 120 searches during a free trial without controller approval or prior assessment of how uploaded biometric data would be handled.

Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.

News reports (4)

Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.

  1. Testing of facial recognition software by NBI reported to Data Protection Ombudsman
    poliisi.fi · Poliisi · AIID #2315
  2. Finnish police denied, then admitted using controversial facial recognition app
    yle.fi · YLE News · AIID #2409
  3. Clearview AI Offered Free Trials To Police Around The World
    buzzfeednews.com · Ryan Mac, Caroline Haskins, Antonio Pequeño IV · AIID #2408
  4. Finnish SA: Police reprimanded for illegal processing of personal data with facial recognition software
    edpb.europa.eu · European Data Protection Board · AIID #2410

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Privacy People whose images were uploaded to Clearview AI Minors Child sexual abuse victims Biometric data subjects
On AIID: Privacy, People whose images were uploaded to Clearview AI, Minors, Child sexual abuse victims, Biometric data subjects

AI systems implicated

Law enforcement facial recognition systemsFacial recognition systemsClearview AI facial recognition systemClearview AI facial image databaseBiometric data processing systemsAI-enabled decision support systems

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Unintentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
none
Sectors
law enforcement, information and communication
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 2.1.

  • Risks to privacy

    "General- purpose AI models or systems can ‘leak’ information about individuals whose data was used in training. For future models trained on sensitive personal data like health or financial data, this may lead to partic...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

  • Risks to privacy

    "General- purpose AI systems can cause or contribute to violations of user privacy. Violations can occur inadvertently during the training or usage of AI systems, for example through unauthorised processing of personal d...

    International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

  • Privacy Leakage

    "Privacy Leakage means the generated content includes sensitive personal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Private Training Data

    "As recent LLMs continue to incorporate licensed, created, and publicly available data sources in their corpora, the potential to mix private data in the training corpora is significantly increased. The misused private d...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Memorization in LLMs

    "Memorization in LLMs refers to the capability to recover the training data with contextual prefixes. According to [88]–[90], given a PII entity x, which is memorized by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Association in LLMs

    "Association in LLMs refers to the capability to associate various pieces of information related to a person. According to [68], [86], given a pair of PII entities (xi , xj ), which is associated by a model F. Using a pr...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy Leakage

    "The model is trained with personal data in the corpus and unintentionally exposing them during the conversation."

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy and regulation violations

    "Some of the broken systems discussed above are also very invasive of people’s privacy, controlling, for instance, the length of someone’s last romantic relationship [51]. More recently, ChatGPT was banned in Italy over...

    Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Law enforcement