Canadian Privacy Commissioners to Investigate Creepy Facial Recognition Firm Clearview AI - 2020-02-21

Canadian Privacy Commissioners to Investigate Creepy Facial Recognition Firm Clearview AI February 21, 2020, Tom McKay, Gizmodo

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Canadian authorities are investigating shady face recognition company Clearview AI on the grounds that its scraping of billions of photos from the web might violate privacy laws, Reuters reported on Friday.

According to Reuters, privacy commissioners from the Canadian federal government and of the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Québec have all agreed to launch a joint investigation into the company's activities. In a statement, the commissioners wrote that Clearview's data scraping, along with admissions by Canadian law enforcement that they have used the service in police work, "raised questions and concerns about whether the company is collecting and using personal information without consent." Laws that they believe may have been violated include Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and regional laws concerning the use of user data in Quebec.

The privacy commissioners say they will also be looking into alleged use of Clearview's tools in the financial sector, though they did not release additional information about what practices they are investigating.

Wikipedia cite:

{{cite news | first = Tom | last = McKay | title = Canadian Privacy Commissioners to Investigate Creepy Facial Recognition Firm Clearview AI | url = https://gizmodo.com/canadian-privacy-commissioners-to-investigate-creepy-fa-1841841033 | work = Gizmodo | date = February 21, 2020 | accessdate = April 9, 2020 }}