We're Taking Clearview AI to Court
The short version: The ACLU's lawsuit against Clearview AI is a reminder that faceprints and license plates are two sides of the same surveillance coin: data scraped without consent and monetized at scale.
Our Take
Credit where it's due: the ACLU is going after Clearview AI for scraping billions of faces off the internet and selling access to that biometric database without anyone's say-so. It's a fight worth watching, because the legal theory here — that harvesting and monetizing someone's identity without consent is a privacy violation, not just a business model — is exactly the argument that should be aimed at automated license plate readers too.
Flock Safety and its ALPR network operate on the same basic premise as Clearview: capture something about you in public, store it indefinitely, build a searchable profile, and let paying customers query it. Swap 'faceprint' for 'plate read plus GPS timestamp' and you've got the same surveillance architecture, just aimed at your car instead of your face. Courts and legislatures are finally starting to ask whether 'it was technically visible in public' is a legal shield or just a loophole that swallows the Fourth Amendment.
If this case against Clearview succeeds, it sets a precedent that mass biometric collection without consent has consequences — and that's a precedent ALPR critics can build on. In the meantime, check our map to see how many Flock cameras are already logging your movements, and hit up our take-action page if you want to push back locally.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of ACLU, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.