The face recognition app Clearview AI is not welcome in Canada, and the company that developed it must remove Canadian faces from its database, the country’s privacy commissioner said on Wednesday.
“What Clearview is doing is mass surveillance and it is illegal,” Commissioner Daniel Therrien said at a news conference. He forcibly denounced the company as “constantly putting the whole society in a police position”. Although the Canadian government has no legal authority to enforce the removal of photographs, the position – the strongest position a country takes against the company – was clear: “This is completely unacceptable.”
Clearview has scraped more than three billion photos from social media networks and other public websites to build a face recognition app that, according to the company, is now used by more than 2,400 U.S. law enforcement agencies. When an officer does a search, the app provides links to sites on the web where the person’s face appeared. The scope of the company’s scope and law enforcement application was first reported in January 2020 by The New York Times.
Mr. Therrien, along with three local privacy commissioners in Canada, began an investigation into Clearview a year ago after the article about the company was published. Privacy laws in Canada require people to be allowed to use their personal data, which gives the government the reasons to investigate. Authorities in Australia and the United Kingdom are jointly launching their own investigation.
Dozens of law enforcement agencies and organizations across Canada have used the app, according to commissioners, including the National Royal Canadian Mounted Police. One Canadian law enforcement official told The Times last year that it was “the biggest breakthrough in the past decade” for the investigation into crimes against child sexual abuse. ‘Thousands of searches’ were carried out, according to a report from the commissioners, but only one agency paid for the app, mainly because a number of groups used it through a free trial.
According to the commissioners’ report, Clearview said it did not require permission from Canadians to use biometric information in the face because the information came from photos that were on the public Internet. There is an exception in the privacy legislation for information available to the public. The commission does not agree.
“Information collected from public websites, such as social media or professional profiles and then used for an unrelated purpose, does not fall under the ‘publicly available’ exception,” according to the report. The commissioners objected to the images being used in a way that the posters of the photos did not intend and in a way that ‘could cause the risk of serious harm to those individuals’.
Clearview AI has said it intends to appeal the decision in court. “Clearview AI only collects public information from the Internet that is expressly permitted,” Doug Mitchell, a lawyer for Clearview AI, said in a statement. “Clearview AI is a search engine that collects public data just like larger companies, including Google, are allowed to operate in Canada.”
The commissioners, noting that they do not have the power to fine companies or place orders, sent a “letter of intent” to Clearview AI stating that it would stop offering its face recognition services in Canada, and to stop scraping the Canadian’s faces. and to delete images that have already been collected.
This is a difficult order: it is not possible to tell someone’s nationality or where they live only from their face.
Hoan Ton-That, chief executive of Clearview AI, said on Wednesday that the company went on strike in Canada last July but had no plans to proactively remove Canadians from its database.
The company has previously made the effort to erase faces after violating local privacy laws. Last year, Clearview in Illinois was sued for violating the Biometric Information Privacy Act, which states that businesses must get people’s permission before using their face photos. Clearview sought to remove the faces of Illinois by looking at metadata and geographic information, for example. It also allows state residents to request removal by uploading photos of themselves via an ‘opt-out form’.
Mr. Ton-That said Clearview enables Canadians to reject from the database in the same way.
Mr. Therrien was not happy with the solution. “You realize the irony of the remedy, and require individuals to provide further personal information about themselves,” he said.
Mr. Ton-That said he was eager to fight the finding in court. “It’s a simple matter of public information and who has access to it and why,” he said. “We do not want a world where only Google and a few other technology companies have access to public information.”