Clearview AI in policing

Legal basis

Varies by state; several states and 20+ cities have banned or restricted police facial recognition

Oversight

Fragmented. State and city-level restrictions in some jurisdictions, but no single federal framework.

Clearview markets its database of images scraped from the web as an investigative lead generation tool, and states that results are indicative rather than definitive matches requiring further verification. The roughly 3,100 US agency figure originates from the company itself and should be read as a historical vendor estimate, not a verified current count. A caution on attribution that matters for accuracy: not every US facial recognition wrongful arrest is a Clearview case, and this entry should not absorb them. The documented Clearview-attributed cases are Randal Quran Reid (Georgia, arrested for a Louisiana offence he had no connection to) and a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office case that led to a $200,000 settlement. By contrast, the June 2026 Florida suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of Robert Dillon concerns Pinellas County's FACES system, not Clearview, and the ACLU's April 2026 update identifying a fourteenth publicly known US wrongful arrest does not attribute a vendor in most cases. Legal position: the Seventh Circuit overturned the class settlement in the Illinois BIPA consumer privacy litigation on 13 July 2026. Federal contracting continues. ICE Homeland Security Investigations signed a $9.2m contract in September 2025; US Customs and Border Protection signed a one-year $225,000 contract on 11 February 2026 for tactical targeting operations; and the US Army's 1st Special Forces Command has a contract with a base period running March 2026 to March 2027, with options to 2030 and a total potential value of $339,415.

Source: Company statements; ACLU documentation of wrongful arrest cases; contract reporting · last checked 2026-08-26

Legal basis

Privacy Act (federal public sector); found in breach

Oversight

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Special Report to Parliament

The RCMP's use of Clearview AI ended after the Office of the Privacy Commissioner found in 2021 that it violated the federal Privacy Act, since Clearview's underlying image collection was itself unlawful. Clearview ceased Canadian operations shortly afterward. In response, the RCMP established the National Technology Onboarding Program (NTOP) in 2021 to centralise assessment of new operational technologies. The RCMP's own 2026 transparency publication states it currently uses only 'face matching' (grouping and sorting lawfully obtained images and video, not searching to identify an unknown individual) rather than full facial identification, and that it does not use facial recognition on footage captured by its drone fleet. Separately, other Canadian police services have moved into live and image-search facial recognition; see the Edmonton, York/Peel and Toronto entries.

Source: Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Special Report to Parliament · last checked 2026-08-26

Legal basis

Privacy Act 1988; Australian Government Agencies Privacy Code

Oversight

Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), joint investigation with UK ICO

This trial was run specifically by the Australian Federal Police's Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE), not the AFP generally. The AFP's own account, given in a Senate Estimates brief, states ACCCE personnel ran a limited pilot from November 2019 to January 2020, testing whether Clearview could match side-profile photographs of possible child exploitation victims against frontal reference images; temporary accounts were terminated in March 2020. The Australian Information Commissioner subsequently found the AFP had failed to comply with its privacy obligations, including a requirement to complete a privacy impact assessment before the trial. Separately, and consistent with the free-trial period documented for other Australian police services in this entry, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia police also had access during the same general window.

Source: Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, Commissioner-initiated investigation determination · last checked 2026-08-26

Legal basis

None in place at the time; this absence is what the regulatory reprimand below addresses

Oversight

Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman, who reprimanded the National Police Board

Finland's National Bureau of Investigation ran approximately 120 Clearview AI searches in early 2020 while trying to identify possible victims in child sexual abuse material, producing one hit, and separately tested Arachnid for the same purpose; police concluded Clearview was unsuitable for the task. The Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman subsequently reprimanded the National Police Board because the trial had taken place without appropriate controller approval or supervision.

Source: Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman (Finland), statutory reprimand · last checked 2026-08-26

Legal basis

No facial-recognition-specific statute identified. No federal legislation mandating disclosure in criminal proceedings (the proposed Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act) has passed.

Oversight

DC Superior Court order (7 July 2026, Judge Neal Kravitz) compelling prosecutorial disclosure of the identification pipeline in one specific case; no standing regulatory oversight body identified

A Metropolitan Police Department investigation into a non-fatal shooting on 8 June 2026 near Howard University led to the arrest of Marquis Foster, 43, on 1 July, charged with assault with intent to kill while armed. Investigators identified Foster by feeding surveillance footage from the crime scene into Clearview AI, which matches a submitted image against a database the company describes as holding public photographs scraped from social media and other websites. Sources differ on the database's scale: DC Witness, reporting directly from the court, states over 30 billion images; Biometric Update's coverage of the same proceedings states more than 70 billion. Both figures are reported here rather than resolved. DC Superior Court Judge Neal Kravitz ordered prosecutors on 7 July 2026 to disclose to both the court and the defence exactly how the technology was used, after defence counsel Elizabeth Weller told the hearing she had not previously encountered the process. The parties were scheduled to reconvene on 22 July. The order does not itself rule on the admissibility or reliability of the identification; it compels disclosure of the identification pipeline, which civil liberties attorneys have described as an opaque, multi-step process that is difficult to challenge without exactly this kind of order. This is reported as part of a wider pattern: US commentators identify at least eight documented wrongful arrests attributed to facial recognition in 2026, including cases in Florida and Nevada involving different vendors and forces, though the Foster case itself does not allege a wrongful identification, only seeks transparency into how the identification was made. No federal legislation comparable to the proposed Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act, which would mandate disclosure in criminal proceedings nationally, has passed.

Source: DC Witness; Biometric Update · last checked 2026-09-03

Argentina's national Ministry of Security acquired a Clearview AI licence in October 2025 for USD 33,500 by direct contract, according to Chequeado's review of the ministry's procurement records and to Amnesty International's report 'Estado de vigilancia: la expansión del uso de tecnologías de vigilancia masiva por el Gobierno de Argentina', which covers December 2023 to December 2025. Amnesty records that the tool is used by the Policía Federal Argentina and that the ministry states it is used only for retrospective investigation. Clearview matches a submitted photograph against a corpus described in both sources as more than 70 billion images scraped from public internet sources. The same procurement review records a Maltego open-source intelligence licence at USD 239,013, a Nosis commercial-data subscription at USD 17,000, and 69 drones with 11 ground stations at roughly USD 1 million, giving at least USD 1.2 million of surveillance technology bought in 2024-2025. legalBasis is deliberately empty: both sources describe decrees and ministerial resolutions that expanded digital monitoring powers without prior judicial authorisation, and Amnesty records that Federal Police social-media monitoring was formalised on that footing, but no source read in this run establishes a specific statutory basis for facial recognition itself, and an absence of one is a finding about the deployment rather than a legal basis. oversight is empty for the same reason. Both figures and dates here rest on Spanish-language reporting and on an NGO report summarised in Spanish; the underlying contract documents were not opened in this run. See also the separate record for the Buenos Aires City prosecution service, which holds its own, distinct Clearview licence.

Source: Chequeado · last checked 2026-09-10

Established by the prosecution service's own signed procurement instrument, Disposición OAF 36/2025 of 11 June 2025, actuación interna 30-00103493, which awards Contratación Directa por Exclusividad 3/2025 to VEC S.R.L. (CUIT 30-61564727-2) for 'la Licencia de software CLEARVIEW PRO por un periodo de 12 meses para uso del Ministerio Público Fiscal de la CABA' at USD 27,588 including VAT. VEC S.R.L. is the exclusive distributor; the vendor field records Clearview AI as the maker of the software. elDiarioAR reported in 2025 that the tool was in use by August 2025 and that the prosecution service states it is used only within a criminal investigation at the express request of a fiscal, to shorten the work of tracing images already published on the public internet, and 'not for preventive purposes nor intelligence tasks'. Unlike the city's separate street camera system, this tool works on images from social media and the open web rather than live camera feeds. legalBasis is empty: the disposición is a procurement instrument, not a legal basis for biometric matching, and no source read establishes a statutory framework or a requirement of prior judicial authorisation — the safeguards described are the prosecution service's own internal statements. oversight is empty for the same reason. CELS and ODIA, quoted by elDiarioAR, argue the acquisition disregards both the courts and civil society given that the city's other facial recognition system remains judicially suspended, and note the Dutch data protection authority's EUR 30.5 million fine against Clearview in September 2024. The procurement document is in Spanish.

Source: Ministerio Público Fiscal CABA · last checked 2026-09-10