Nov 5, 2024
Washington, D.C. – On November 4, 2024, Tech Justice Law Project (TJLP), Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and Consumer Federation of America (CFA) filed an amici curiae or “friend of the court” brief supporting California-based activists and advocacy organizations suing notorious facial recognition provider Clearview AI for violating their privacy rights.
The case is on appeal after the trial court denied Clearview’s motion to dismiss the case under California’s anti-SLAPP law, which is meant to protect activists from lawsuits brought by powerful organizations to silence their actions and drown them in legal fees. Rather than endure these expensive and punishing lawsuits, activists can file an anti-SLAPP motion to preserve their speech and petition rights from legal suppression. In this case, Clearview unsuccessfully argued that its development and sale of a massive, proprietary facial recognition product is akin to a protest action or similar public petition activity. On appeal, Clearview is doubling down on this argument in an attempt to get the case tossed out early, before the company has to hand over important internal information about its product during discovery.
In their brief, TJLP, EPIC, and CFA argue that Clearview cannot avail itself of anti-SLAPP protections because of the law’s public interest exception, which allows cases to proceed if the litigants are suing to right a public wrong and their success would serve the public interest. Here, Clearview built its product from scraping billions of photos from the internet without consent, using those images to train its AI systems to identify unique faces, and licensing access to its product and underlying database to law enforcement across California, the U.S., and the globe. The brief argues that Clearview’s conduct implicates the privacy rights of millions of Californians whose faces power its product, many of whom may not be aware of or support the enmeshment of their identities in a surveillance technology. This lawsuit furthers the state’s public policy goals in preserving Californian’s control over the use of their identities by others, especially for profit. If successful, a court could order Clearview to stop operating in the state, sparing Californians from the company’s commercial exploitation of their personal, unique features–their faces.
“Today, tech companies like Clearview are incentivized to view us as mere data points to aggregate and train algorithms on, using our personal information to create commercial products often without our awareness or consent,” said TJLP Policy Counsel Melodi Dinçer. “Tech companies rarely face legal consequences for mass violations of our privacy rights. Clearview’s manipulation of the anti-SLAPP law is yet another tactic to evade legal accountability. The courts must see through this maneuver and allow the case to go forward, allowing all Californians whose faces drive Clearview’s profits to regain some control over their valuable identities by asserting their privacy rights.”
TJLP plays a distinct role in the tech accountability field, bringing together various advocates, lawyers, organizers, technologists, academics, and others to ensure that consumer safety becomes part of the broader discourse on tech policy. TJLP often works with partner organizations to file briefs and other support in cases challenging harmful tech products and business practices.