The Clearview Database That's Still Scraping: ICO Can't Stop It

Our Take

Credit to Tech Exposed for tracing the paper trail on Clearview AI — a company that scraped billions of faces off the open web, sold matching access to police departments, and then simply out-lawyered a regulator that tried to shut it down. The video is AI-narrated and the ICO case details deserve independent verification, but the core pattern it describes is one we see constantly in the ALPR world: a private surveillance vendor builds a biometric or location dataset first, asks forgiveness later, and counts on jurisdictional gaps to keep the product alive.

That's the same playbook Flock Safety runs with license plate data. Fines, audits, and polite regulatory letters don't delete a database or unwind a business model built on selling access to other people's movements. Clearview's face vault and Flock's plate network are different technologies solving the same problem for the same customers — mass, searchable identification without a warrant — and both rely on the public assuming someone else is minding the store.

Nobody is minding the store. If you want to see how dense this infrastructure already is in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on local deployments, our take-action guide walks through what actually works at a city council meeting.