Clearview AI settles ACLU's Illinois biometric-privacy lawsuit

Clearview AI settled the lawsuit the ACLU, the ACLU of Illinois and Edelson PC had filed in May 2020 under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), one of the few US state laws giving individuals a private right to sue over unconsented collection of their biometric data. A Cook County court signed the consent order resolving the case; Clearview and the ACLU each announced it separately within days of one another.

The settlement permanently barred Clearview from selling or licensing access to its facial-recognition database — built by scraping billions of images from the public web — to most private companies and individuals anywhere in the US. It also froze new sales to Illinois police and other government agencies for five years, and required Clearview to maintain an opt-out mechanism letting Illinois residents remove their photos from its database and to stop its free trials for individual police officers acting outside an institutional account. Clearview paid $250,000 toward the plaintiffs’ legal fees, admitted no liability, and — notably — retained the ability to keep selling to law enforcement and government agencies outside Illinois, and to license its underlying algorithm, without the accompanying photo database, to private security customers.

The settlement did not resolve BIPA claims nationwide, only the Illinois suit; a separate, broader nationwide class action against Clearview over the same practices was settled on different terms — reportedly including an equity stake for class members — and approved by a federal court in 2025. Coverage of the two settlements has sometimes been conflated; the 2022 Illinois settlement itself involved no payment or equity to individual claimants, only the sales restrictions and fee award described above.