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Garante fines Clearview AI 20 million euro over its facial recognition database

Garante took fine action against Clearview AI Inc. over Clearview AI facial recognition search engine, announced 9 March 2022. The amount is 20 million euro. Status: confirmed.

The record

Key facts

Record ID
AIT-2022-0001
Status
Confirmed
Action type
Fine
Regime
GDPR
Authority
Garante per la protezione dei dati personali
Jurisdiction
Italy
Target
Clearview AI Inc., headquartered in United States
Sector
Biometric identification
AI system
Clearview AI facial recognition search engine
Date announced
Date of decision
Amount
20 million euro
Appeal
None recorded. No annulment recorded. The company has publicly disputed European jurisdiction over its processing.
Last verified

In full

What happened, and why it matters

Italy's data protection authority fined Clearview AI 20 million euro for building a searchable biometric database out of images scraped from the open web, including images of people in Italy who had never heard of the company. The Garante found the processing had no legal basis, that special category biometric data was processed outside every Article 9 gateway, and that data subjects were never informed. The decision rejected Clearview's argument that scraping publicly accessible images placed the processing outside the reach of the GDPR: publication does not make a face free to index, and the purpose of the processing was monitoring the behaviour of people in Italy. Alongside the fine, the authority ordered the company to erase the data of people located in Italy, to stop collecting further images of them, and to appoint an Article 27 representative in the Union. The case matters far beyond Italy. Three European authorities fined the same company on the same facts inside two and a half years, and the pattern set here, that a training or reference dataset assembled by scraping is a processing operation like any other, is the reasoning European regulators carried into the generative AI cases that followed. Under the AI Act, the untargeted scraping of facial images to build recognition databases is now itself a prohibited practice under Article 5.

At a glance

The four things to take away

  • Fine of 20 million euro, decision of 10 February 2022, announced 9 March 2022.
  • Deletion order covering the biometric data of all people in Italy.
  • Order to designate a representative in the European Union.
  • Same company was later fined by the French and Dutch authorities on comparable facts.

Orders

What the authority required

  • delete the biometric and personal data of people in Italy
  • stop any further collection and processing of that data
  • designate a representative in the European Union

The law

Provisions this action rests on

Read the official text of Article 5 in the EU AI Act Explorer, consolidated with the Digital Omnibus applied.

How it moved

Timeline

  1. Garante adopts decision no. 50 imposing the fine and corrective measures

  2. Decision published and announced

Verification

Sources

Primary sources are the authority's own decision or press release, the Official Journal, or a court judgment. A record with no source is not published.

  1. Garante, provvedimento del 10 febbraio 2022 (doc. web 9751362)Primary · 10 February 2022
  2. EDPB national news, Italian SA fines Clearview AI 20 million euroPrimary · 9 March 2022

Next

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Cite this record

Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. The record ID AIT-2022-0001 is permanent and is never reused.

In a sentence
According to the GAGE EU AI Act Enforcement Tracker (as of 20 August 2026), garante fines clearview ai 20 million euro over its facial recognition database.
APA
GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). (2026). Garante fines Clearview AI 20 million euro over its facial recognition database. EU AI Act Enforcement Tracker. Retrieved 20 August 2026, from https://www.gage.academy/tools/eu-ai-act-enforcement-tracker/actions/AIT-2022-0001-garante-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-fine
MLA
"Garante fines Clearview AI 20 million euro over its facial recognition database." EU AI Act Enforcement Tracker, GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education), 20 August 2026, https://www.gage.academy/tools/eu-ai-act-enforcement-tracker/actions/AIT-2022-0001-garante-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-fine.
Chicago
GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). "Garante fines Clearview AI 20 million euro over its facial recognition database." EU AI Act Enforcement Tracker. Last modified 20 August 2026. https://www.gage.academy/tools/eu-ai-act-enforcement-tracker/actions/AIT-2022-0001-garante-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-fine.
Permalink
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