According to the American news website Buzzfeed, the Belgian federal police have already used the facial recognition software Clearview AI more than a hundred times. That software is in violation of the GDPR.
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Identify someone in seconds. That’s what Clearview’s software does. It compares the photo of a suspicious person with billions of photos on social media and can come up with an identification within seconds. But by using those images, Clearview has violated Facebook and LinkedIn usage rules, the Hamburg Data Protection Authority says. This would also violate European GDPR legislation.
From data that Buzzfeed was able to view in early 2020, police forces, legal institutions, universities and Home Affairs departments from all over the world together entered almost 14,000 searches using the Clearview software. Belgian police services were also on that list. But that was denied by the government at the time. Interpol, on the other hand, admitted that some officers had taken advantage of a free trial.
Meanwhile, Buzzfeed has been able to provide a more detailed list of government agencies and law enforcement agencies that would have used or tested the software before February 2020. This would involve 88 institutions in 24 countries. This includes the Belgian federal police. Buzzfeed’s research shows that they would have done between 101 and 500 searches.
Buzzfeed has asked the Belgian federal police for a response, but it has not yet been forthcoming. Last year in May, the Police Information Supervisory Body (COC) already announced that Clearview was not being used and that there were no plans to use the software. “But in view of the new data in the article, the COC has reopened this investigation with a new question to the Commissioner General,” Frank Schuermans, COC member councilor, told De Standaard.
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