EPIC: Privacy Lawsuit Against Clearview AI is About Protecting People’s Rights, Not Silencing Clearview AI’s “Speech”

This week, EPIC joined an amicus brief in Renderos v. Clearview AI urging the Ninth Circuit to recognize that lawsuits against privacy-invading companies are valuable ways to protect people’s rights, not back-door attempts to silence the companies’ speech.

Renderos v. Clearview AI is a lawsuit against one of the most notorious face recognition companies in the world, which scraped billions of people’s faces from the internet and used them to train an algorithm marketed toward the police and security services. This scraping was performed secretly without anybody’s knowledge or consent. Now, people whose faces were scraped and who fear police reprisal for their political advocacy are suing Clearview AI alleging violations of their constitutional and statutory privacy rights.

Clearview AI has responded with a legal trick used by many corporate entities sued for their wrongdoing: an anti-SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) motion. Anti-SLAPP laws were passed to protect people who speak out against corporate abuse from facing frivolous but expensive lawsuits filed to silence them. Increasingly, it is being used by those same companies against people attempting to sue the companies.

Clearview AI argues that this case is a frivolous lawsuit meant to silence its speech, but it lost in the district court because the court recognized that the lawsuit aimed to vindicate people’s privacy rights, not to censor Clearview AI. Clearview AI appealed this ruling to the Ninth Circuit.

EPIC joined onto a brief written by the Tech Justice Law Project and the Consumer Federation of America urging the Ninth Circuit to affirm the lower court’s ruling. The brief explains the history of anti-SLAPP laws, the troubling way that corporations have turned anti-SLAPP into a tool that sometimes places corporations above people, and why the current case does not fit into the anti-SLAPP framework.

EPIC regularly advocates for users’ privacy and speech rights online and pushes back on overbroad corporate claims to constitutional rights that prevent accountability.