


Eventually, the RCMP and Ontario Provincial Police issued statements indicating facial recognition was used in order to help identify and rescue some minors seen being sexually abused in anonymized internet images exchanged by pedophiles.įebruary’s joint investigation by the four privacy commissioners found that 48 entities in Canada had obtained accounts with Clearview starting in 2019.
CLEARVIEW TIM HORTONS SOFTWARE
When the software was still being used in Canada in early 2020, many police forces publicly denied using the software despite their detectives having done so. In November, Australian privacy officials also demanded Clearview AI purge the images of Australians. “It is simply not possible, merely from photographs, to identify whether the individuals in the photographs are in Canada at the time the photograph was taken, or whether they are Canadian citizens, residents, etc.” The orders also quote exchanges that the privacy officials had with Clearview AI in which the company says it cannot comply with the purging of orders. The timelines vary but the shared demand is for Clearview to purge the images this winter. legislation allows its privacy officials to impose “a fine of not more than $100,000″ against organizations found to flout privacy laws.Įach of the provincial privacy commissioner orders issued this month give Clearview AI weeks to comply with the formal orders to delete Canadians’ faces. Other provincial offices, however, have heightened powers. Nor do several provincial privacy commissioners. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has issued no orders because it has no legislated powers to act against corporations. “Clearview believes the orders being sought are beyond the powers of the provincial privacy commissioners,” he added. “Clearview AI is a search engine that only collects public data just as much larger companies do, including Google,” the company’s Canadian lawyer, Doug Mitchell, said in statement.

The company responded Tuesday by saying faces are just another form of data. “The commissioner considered and rejected Clearview’s position and issued a binding order to comply with the recommendations.” “Clearview refused to comply with the recommendations by arguing it could not comply with them,” reads the order from B.C.’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Through this month’s issue of formal orders, they have now done so. The privacy commissioners vowed then to take follow-up actions if Clearview did not delete Canadians’ faces. It alleged that the software had been used in contravention of federal and provincial privacy laws that give Canadians control of how their images are used. In February, the three provincial privacy commissioners and federal Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien revealed the findings of a joint investigation. Nor did the social-media companies sanction Clearview AI’s scraping. Users of the social-media sites, however, have never consented for their images to be used in this way. It works well at identifying people in photographs because the company has built a global index of faces by scraping billions of images off social-media sites. The Clearview AI software is marketed to law enforcement officials.
