The Clearview AI facial recognition app is not welcome in Canada and the company that developed it should exclude Canadians’ faces from its database, the country’s privacy commissioner said on Wednesday.
“What Clearview does is mass surveillance, and that is illegal,” Commissioner Daniel Therrien said at a news conference. He vehemently denounced the company for putting the whole of society “continuously in a police queue”. Although the Canadian government has no legal authority to impose the removal of the photo, the position – the strongest one that an individual country has taken against the company – was clear: “This is completely unacceptable.”
Clearview collected more than three billion photos from social media and other public websites to build a facial recognition app that is now used by more than 2,400 U.S. law enforcement agencies, according to the company. When a police officer does a search, the app provides links to websites on the web where the person’s face appeared. The scope of the company’s reach and law enforcement were first reported by The New York Times in January 2020.
Mr. Therrien, along with three regional privacy commissioners in Canada, started an investigation into Clearview a year ago, after the article about the company was published. Canada’s privacy laws require individuals to consent to the use of their personal data, giving the government grounds to conduct an investigation. Australian and UK authorities are jointly conducting their own investigation.
Dozens of law enforcement agencies and organizations across Canada have used the app, according to commissioners, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A Canadian police officer told The Times last year that it was “the biggest breakthrough in the past decade” in investigating child sexual abuse crimes. “Thousands of searches” were carried out, said a report from the commissioners, but only one agency was paying for the app, mainly because several groups used it through a free trial.
According to the commissioners ‘report, Clearview said he did not need Canadians’ consent to use facial biometric information, because that information came from photos that were on the public Internet. There is an exception in the privacy law for publicly available information. The commission disagreed.
“Information collected on public websites, such as social media or professional profiles, and then used for unrelated purposes, does not fall under the ‘publicly available’ exception,” according to the report. The commissioners objected that the images were used in a way that the photo posters had not intended and in a way that could “create the risk of significant harm to these people”.
Clearview AI said it plans to challenge the determination in court. “Clearview AI only collects public information from the Internet that is explicitly permitted,” said Doug Mitchell, a lawyer at Clearview AI, in a statement. “Clearview AI is a search engine that collects public data in the same way that larger companies do, including Google, which is allowed to operate in Canada.”
The flight attendants, who noted that they do not have the power to fine companies or place orders, sent a “letter of intent” to Clearview AI telling it to stop offering its facial recognition services in Canada, stop shaving Canadian faces. , and delete already collected images.
This is a difficult order: it is not possible to tell a person’s nationality or where they live just by face.
Hoan Ton-That, chief executive of Clearview AI, said on Wednesday that because of the investigation, the company stopped operating in Canada last July, but had no plans to proactively exclude Canadians from its database.
The company had already struggled to exclude faces after coming into conflict with local privacy laws. Last year, Clearview was sued in Illinois for violating that state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, which says companies must obtain people’s consent before using images of their faces. Clearview tried to delete faces of Illinois residents, for example, by looking at photo metadata and geographic information. It also allows state residents to request removal, by sending photos of themselves using a “cancellation form”.
Mr. Ton-That said Clearview allows Canadians to choose to leave the database in the same way.
Mr. Therrien was not satisfied with this solution. “You realize the irony of the remedy, requiring people to provide more personal information about themselves,” he said.
Mr. Ton-That said he was looking forward to fighting the court decision. “This is a simple matter of public information and who has access to it and why,” he said. “We don’t want a world where it’s just Google and a few other technology companies accessing public information.”