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Clearview AI Algorithm Built on Photos Scraped from Social Media Profiles without Consent

10 news reports Synced from source · record last edited 31 Aug 2026

In brief

An AI system built and deployed by Clearview AI allegedly harmed Social media users, Privacy and 3 others.

Risk domain
Privacy & Security Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information
Occurred
Coverage
10 reportsJan 2020 - Oct 2022

What happened

Face-matching algorithm by Clearview AI was built using scraped images from social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook without user consent, violating social media site policies, and allegedly privacy regulations.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Privacy & Security (Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (10)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
    nytimes.com · Kashmir Hill
  2. Scraping the Web Is a Powerful Tool. Clearview AI Abused It
    wired.com · Louise Matsakis
  3. ACLU Called Clearview AI’s Facial Recognition Accuracy Study “Absurd”
    buzzfeednews.com · Caroline Haskins, Ryan Mac, Logan McDonald
  4. ACLU rejects Clearview AI's facial recognition accuracy claims
    engadget.com · Jon Fingas
  5. Clearview AI uses your online photos to instantly ID you. That's a problem, lawsuit says
    latimes.com · Johana Bhuiyan
  6. Clearview AI sued in California by immigrant rights groups, activists
    edition.cnn.com · Rachel Metz
  7. Activists and Rights Groups Sue Clearview AI, Warning 'We Won't Be Safe' Until Facial Recognition Firm Is Gone
    commondreams.org · Brett Wilkins
  8. Immigration Activists Want Clearview AI and Its Facial Recognition Tech Banned in California
    legalreader.com · Ryan J. Farrick
  9. Facial recog firm Clearview hit with complaints in France, Austria, Italy, Greece and the UK
    theregister.com · Jude Karabus
  10. French regulator fines US face recognition firm Clearview AI €20 million
    lemonde.fr · Le Monde

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Clearview AI
Alleged developer
Clearview AI
Alleged harmed party
Social media users Privacy Instagram users Facebook users Biometric data subjects

AI systems implicated

Surveillance technologyFacial recognition systemsFacial image search enginesFaceprint generation systemsClearview AI facial recognition systemClearview AI facial image databaseBiometric data processing systems

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
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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)

  • 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)

  • 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

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

    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)

  • 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

Source record: incident #267 on the AI Incident Database · all 10 reports