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CNIL fines Clearview AI 20 million euro and orders it to stop processing data on people in France

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

The record

Key facts

Record ID
AIT-2022-0002
Status
Confirmed
Action type
Fine
Regime
GDPR
Authority
Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés
Jurisdiction
France
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.
Last verified

In full

What happened, and why it matters

The French authority fined Clearview AI 20 million euro and ordered it to stop collecting and using images of people in France, eight months after Italy reached the same conclusion on the same product. The CNIL had first issued a formal notice in November 2021 and found that the company had simply not responded to it. Three failures carried the decision. The processing had no legal basis, because the legitimate interest the company relied on could not outweigh the intrusiveness of indexing a person's face without their knowledge. Rights were not workable in practice: access requests were limited to twice a year, restricted to data collected in the preceding twelve months, and often left unanswered. Erasure requests went the same way. The decision attached a penalty payment of 100,000 euro for each day of delay beyond two months, a mechanism that later produced a second, separate financial decision in May 2023 when the company still had not complied. For a tracker built around the AI Act, this record is the clearest early demonstration that a corrective order is not the end of an enforcement action but the start of a second phase, and that the amount an authority announces on day one is rarely the amount that ends up being owed.

At a glance

The four things to take away

  • Fine of 20 million euro, decision of 17 October 2022.
  • Order to cease collection and to erase French data within two months.
  • Penalty payment of 100,000 euro per day of delay attached to the order.
  • The company had already ignored a formal notice issued in November 2021.

Orders

What the authority required

  • stop collecting and processing data on people in France without a legal basis
  • erase the data already held on those people within two months
  • answer access and erasure requests properly, on penalty of 100,000 euro per day of delay

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. CNIL issues a formal notice to comply

  2. Restricted committee adopts the 20 million euro sanction and the injunction

  3. Decision published

  4. CNIL imposes a further 5.2 million euro in accrued penalty payments for non compliance

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. CNIL, Facial recognition: 20 million euros penalty against Clearview AIPrimary · 20 October 2022

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Cite this record

Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. The record ID AIT-2022-0002 is permanent and is never reused.

In a sentence
According to the GAGE EU AI Act Enforcement Tracker (as of 20 August 2026), cnil fines clearview ai 20 million euro and orders it to stop processing data on people in france.
APA
GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). (2026). CNIL fines Clearview AI 20 million euro and orders it to stop processing data on people in France. EU AI Act Enforcement Tracker. Retrieved 20 August 2026, from https://www.gage.academy/tools/eu-ai-act-enforcement-tracker/actions/AIT-2022-0002-cnil-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-fine
MLA
"CNIL fines Clearview AI 20 million euro and orders it to stop processing data on people in France." 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-2022-0002-cnil-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-fine.
Chicago
GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). "CNIL fines Clearview AI 20 million euro and orders it to stop processing data on people in France." EU AI Act Enforcement Tracker. Last modified 20 August 2026. https://www.gage.academy/tools/eu-ai-act-enforcement-tracker/actions/AIT-2022-0002-cnil-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-fine.
Permalink
https://www.gage.academy/tools/eu-ai-act-enforcement-tracker/actions/AIT-2022-0002-cnil-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-fine

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