Administrative / Public Law · Upper Tribunal (Administrative Appeals Chamber)
The Information Commissioner v Clearview AI Incorporated
Checked against the judgment on 4 September 2026 · how we verify
Facts
The Information Commissioner investigated Clearview AI Incorporated, a Delaware technology company with no corporate presence in the UK, which deploys automated 'crawlers' to 'scrape' facial images and accompanying metadata from the public-facing internet, maps each face into vectors, and stores them in a searchable database of tens of billions of images. Clients — all of whom, on the evidence, carry out criminal law enforcement or national security functions — upload a 'probe image', which is compared against the database and produces a report of closely matching images and related data. Between June 2019 and March 2020 Clearview provided the service to a small number of UK clients on a trial basis (the 'UK Test Phase'), during which 721 searches were made. On 18 May 2022 the Commissioner issued an enforcement notice and a monetary penalty notice imposing a fine of £7,552,800, finding breaches of Articles 5, 6, 9, 14, 15 to 17, 21 and 22 of the GDPR and UK GDPR and a failure to carry out a data protection impact assessment under Article 35. Clearview appealed on 29 June 2022, challenging both the breaches and jurisdiction. The First-tier Tribunal, after a preliminary hearing on 21 to 23 November 2022, decided on 17 October 2023 that Clearview's processing was related to its clients' monitoring of behaviour and so within territorial scope, but fell outside the material scope of the regulations. The Commissioner appealed, and Privacy International intervened.
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