although Clearview did carry out data processing related to monitoring the behaviour of people in the UK, the ICO “did not have jurisdiction” to take enforcement action or issue a fine.

So one of the world’s worst data privacy pigs has found a legal loophole. But that does not justify their actions.

It simply shows how much these laws still need to be improved.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A company which enables its clients to search a database of billions of images scraped from the internet for matches to a particular face has won an appeal against the UK’s privacy watchdog.

Clearview AI offers its clients a system that works like a search engine for faces - users upload a photo and it finds matches in a database of billions of images it has collected.

In March, Clearview’s founder Hoan Ton-That told the BBC it had run nearly a million searches for US police, helping them to solve a range of crimes, including murders.

In the past Clearview AI had commercial customers, but since a 2020 settlement in a case brought by US civil liberties campaigners, the firm now only accepts clients who carry out criminal law enforcement or national security functions.

Clearview does not have UK or EU clients, but its customers are based in the US and in other countries including Panama, Brazil, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, Tuesday’s judgement revealed.

“The appeal turned exclusively on the fact that Clearview’s customers were overseas national security and law enforcement bodies, and so shouldn’t be relied on as granting a blanket permission for such scraping activities more generally.”

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