"Clearview's Dangerous Misreading of the First Amendment Could Spell the End of Privacy Laws", 7 January 2021.

The face surveillance company claims it has a First Amendment right to capture our faceprints without our consent...

Using our faceprints, Clearview offers its customers the ability to secretly target and identify any of us, and then to track us — whether we’re going to a protest, a religious service, a doctor...

In May [2020] we sued Clearview for violating Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), a state law that prohibits capturing individuals’ biometric identifiers... without notice and consent...

Clearview asked the court to dismiss our case, arguing, in part, that the company has a First Amendment right to capture our faceprints without our consent...

Clearview argues that, to create its face recognition product, it gathers publicly-available photographs from across the internet and then uses them to run a search engine that simply expresses Clearview’s opinion about who appears to be in the photos. Clearview claims that, like a search engine, it has a First Amendment right to disseminate information that is already available online.

But our lawsuit doesn’t challenge — and BIPA doesn’t prohibit — Clearview’s gathering or republishing photographs... or expressing its views about who appears in those photos. Clearview is free to discuss or disseminate photographs it finds online. What it can’t do under Illinois law is capture people’s faceprints from those photographs without notice and consent...

If Clearview’s position prevails, states will be powerless to enact protections against violations of privacy that involve data...