Criminal charges filed against AI companies and their US executives

Filing data protection complaints with competent data protection authorities is one thing, filing a criminal complaint is another matter entirely. A criminal complaint has just been filed against the US-based company Clearview AI (Tuesday, October 28, 2025).

Clearview AI scours the internet for all photos containing faces and uses them to build a comprehensive facial and biometric database. According to the company's own statement, it has already collected over 60 billion photos from around the world.

Wealthy customers (officially only security agencies, but demonstrably also companies such as Walmart or the Bank of America) can upload photos of individuals, and the AI facial scan algorithm then identifies the person they are looking for and finds all other photos of that person, including the sources. According to plaintiff noyb (none of your business), facial recognition is "extremely invasive", enabling mass surveillance and "the immediate identification of millions of people".

The fact that noyb, a private data protection organization, feels compelled to take action is due to the fact that the business practices of the US company, which actually aimed to keep its operations surreptitious, were exposed by the New York Times in 2020. Since then, there have been several complaints, prompting data protection organizations in Italy, Greece, France and the Netherlands to impose a total of well over $100 million in fines on Clearview for violating the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), but the shady US company continues to ignore these fines.

The problem is that companies such as Amazon, Google and Meta which have branches in the EU can be prosecuted much more easily than smaller companies that are based exclusively in the US. To date, Clearview AI has not paid a single cent and continues to collect and sell the biometric data of millions of European citizens, with data protection authorities proving toothless in this regard.

As the company continues to brazenly ignore the fundamental rights of all EU citizens, noyb has now filed criminal charges against the company and its executives with the public prosecutor's office in Austria. If successful, this could even lead to prison sentences for those responsible.