Clearview AI's Privacy Settlement: Victims Are Now Shareholders

60 billion faces

Clearview AI scraped more than 60 billion facial images from social media platforms, news sites, and public web pages without consent. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Venmo. if your photo was ever publicly accessible online, Clearview likely has it in their database.

The company built a facial recognition search engine and sold access to law enforcement. Upload a photo, get back matches with links to the source pages where those faces appeared. By 2025, over 3,100 police departments across the United States were using Clearview, along with federal agencies including ICE, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security.

The class action

In 2020, the ACLU filed a class action lawsuit in Illinois under the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Illinois is one of the few states with a private right of action for biometric data violations, meaning individuals can sue directly rather than relying on a state attorney general.

The original verdict valued the violations at $167 million. Clearview had scraped the biometric data of millions of Illinois residents without consent, and BIPA provides for $1,000 to $5,000 per violation.

The "equity" settlement

In 2024, the parties reached a settlement that legal experts have called the most perverse outcome in tech litigation history. Instead of paying $167 million in cash, Clearview agreed to give the plaintiff class a 23% equity stake in the company.

The practical effect: the victims of Clearview's mass surveillance now have a financial interest in Clearview's continued success. If the company grows its surveillance business and becomes more valuable, the victims profit. If Clearview fails or is shut down by regulators, the victims get nothing. The settlement literally aligned the victims' financial incentives with the expansion of the surveillance that harmed them.

The cash component was slashed from $167 million to $4 million. For a class of millions of Illinois residents, that works out to pennies per person.

The lobbying machine

NSO Group, the Israeli spyware company behind Pegasus, spent $1.8 million on lobbying in the U.S. during 2024 and 2025. NSO and Clearview operate in the same ecosystem: surveillance technology sold to governments and law enforcement. NSO's lobbying focused on preventing legislation that would restrict government purchases of commercial surveillance tools.

Clearview itself has spent heavily on lobbying state legislatures considering biometric privacy laws similar to Illinois's BIPA. The company's argument: law enforcement needs these tools, and regulation would hamper public safety.

The regulatory patchwork

• Illinois: BIPA remains the strongest biometric privacy law in the U.S., but the Clearview settlement weakened its deterrent effect
• EU: The GDPR has resulted in multiple fines against Clearview totaling over 50 million euros. Clearview was ordered to delete all data on EU residents
• UK: The Information Commissioner's Office fined Clearview 7.5 million pounds and ordered data deletion
• Canada: The Privacy Commissioner found Clearview violated federal privacy law and ordered operations to cease
• Australia: Same finding, same order

In the U.S., outside of Illinois, there is no federal law restricting facial recognition. Companies can scrape your face, build a biometric profile, and sell it to anyone. The handful of cities that have banned government use of facial recognition (San Francisco, Boston, Portland) represent a tiny fraction of the country.

What this means

Your face is in Clearview's database. That is a near certainty if you have ever had a photo posted publicly online. There is no opt-out mechanism that actually works. Clearview has complied with some deletion requests under GDPR in Europe, but there is no equivalent right in most U.S. states.

The Clearview settlement established a dangerous precedent: if a surveillance company violates your rights at sufficient scale, the remedy might be to make you a shareholder rather than making you whole. The bigger the violation, the more valuable the equity, the less incentive the class has to shut the company down.