Facial recognition company Clearview AI has suffered a legal setback in Canada, where the Supreme Court of British Columbia decided to throw out the company’s petition aimed at cancelling an Information and Privacy Commissioner’s order.
The order aims to prevent Clearview AI from collecting facial biometric data for biometric comparison in the province without the targeted individuals’ consent.
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
The controversial company markets itself as “an investigative platform” that helps law enforcement identify suspects, witnesses, and victims.
Privacy advocates critical of Clearview AI’s activities, however, see it as a major component in the burgeoning facial surveillance industry, stressing in particular the need to obtain consent – via opt-ins – before people’s facial biometrics can be collected.
And Clearview AI is said to subjecting billions of people to this, without consent. From there, the implications for privacy, free speech, and even data security are evident.
The British Columbia Commissioner appears to have been thinking along the same lines when issuing the order, that bans Clearview from selling biometric facial arrays taken from non-consenting individuals to its clients.
In addition, the order instructs Clearview to “make best efforts” to stop the practice in place so far, which includes collection, use, and disclosure of personal data – but also delete this type of information already in the company’s possession.
Right now, there is no time limit to how long Clearview can retain the data, which it collects from the internet using an automated “image crawler.”
Clearview moved to try to get the order dismissed as “unreasonable,” arguing that on the one hand, it is unable to tell if an image of a persons face is that of a Canadian, while also claiming that no Canadian law is broken since this biometric information is available online publicly.
The legal battle, however, revealed that images of faces of residents of British Columbia, children included, are among Clearview’s database of more than three billion photos (of Canadians) – while the total figure is over 50 billion.
The court also finds the Commissioner’s order to be very reasonable indeed – including when rejecting “Clearview’s bald assertion” that, in British Columbia, “it simply could not do” what it does in the US state of Illinois, to comply with the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).
