CHICAGO — A company that collects and sells facial recognition data to law enforcement across the U.S. says it can't be sued in Illinois court under an Illinois biometrics privacy law.
On April 27, New York-based Clearview AI asked a Chicago federal judge to toss a class action lawsuit, accusing it of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. At a minimum, Clearview said the lawsuit doesn't belong in Chicago.
Clearview sells facial recognition data to law enforcement agencies nationwide.
In January, lawyers with the firm of Loevy & Loevy, of Chicago, filed suit on behalf of Illinoisan David Mutnick against Clearview, as well as founder Hoan Ton-That and executive Richard Schwartz, both New York residents. They alleged the company violated personal privacy rights by creating a database of images scraped from public websites to be sold to police as well as banks and retail theft specialists.
The technology, according to Mutnick, includes images of millions of Americans, regardless of criminal past, and therefore amounts to “a massive surveillance state with files on almost every citizen, despite the presumption of innocence.” Mutnick said the company “used artificial intelligence algorithms to scan the facial geometry of each individual depicted in the images, a technique that violates multiple privacy laws.” He further alleged the company “received, and continues to receive, real-time access to criminal investigations — it knows who the police are interested in and, often, where those people may be."
Clearview is "enmeshed in the use of state power against individual American citizens and, further, has the unique opportunity to tipoff and/or extort suspects,” the complaint said.
On April 27, Clearview asked Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman to dismiss Mutnick’s complaint, as well a similar lawsuit from another plaintiff, Anthony Hall, which also listed CDW Government as a defendant. Hall’s complaint does not include claims against Ton-That or Schwartz, but Clearview said the suits should be consolidated per an April 9 order from Coleman.
That motion, filed bv Clearview's attorneys with Jenner & Block’s offices in New York and Chicago, asserted that “not only is it black letter law that a company and its management cannot form a ‘conspiracy,’ ” as Mutnick alleged, but also that Mutnick’s complaint lacks “a single allegation” linking anything Ton-That or Schwartz are said to have done in Illinois.
In its motion, Clearview acknowledged it collects photos publicly available online — defending its business practice as legal — and says Illinois jurisdiction is inappropriate because the images are organized in a searchable database stored on servers based in New York and New Jersey. Although customers can access the database from many locations, “Clearview does not have any employees, real estate, servers, facilities or offices in Illinois; Clearview is not registered to do business in Illinois, and Clearview does not market or advertise its technology in Illinois,” according to the motion.
Clearview further acknowledged that people like Mutnick live in Illinois and upload the images it collects to sites like Facebook and YouTube, but that doesn’t establish jurisdiction when the allegations underpinning the complaint concern actions that took place in New York.
If Coleman won’t dismiss the complaints, Clearview continued, she should at least transfer them to the Sourthern District of New York, “where other plaintiffs have filed four nearly identical putative class actions, and where Mutnick has already appeared before the court” in attempts to intervene, dismiss, stay or transfer those cases.
In his complaint, Mutnick seeks certification of a nationwide class and Illinois subclass, appointment of his lawyers, Chicago’s Loevy & Loevy, as class counsel, statutory and punitive damages, expungement of contested records and a court order preventing Clearview from further using individual biometric identifiers and ordering the company to delete and destroy its collected information.