Although the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) specifically
precludes private lawsuits except for those resulting from certain
data breaches, that has not stopped at least one plaintiff from
bringing a putative class action based on an alleged CCPA
violation.
A proposed class action was filed on February 27, 2020, in the
Southern District of California against Clearview AI (Burke v. Clearview
AI, Inc., S.D. Cal., No. 3:20-cv-00370-BAS-MSB). The
complaint alleges that Clearview's facial recognition
technology – which scrapes, without notice or consent, social
media websites for images of consumers' faces – violates,
among other laws, both the CCPA and the Illinois Biometric
Information Privacy Act (BIPA). According to the complaint,
Clearview's facial recognition software uses the billions of
scraped images in its database to generate a type of biometric
information, known as a "faceprint," to match a face to
other personally identifiable information; it then
