Clearview AI, the U.S.-based facial recognition technology firm, is allowing Canadians to check whether their face appears in the company’s massive image database. Ontario’s privacy watchdog says residents should also be allowed to request their data be deleted, like citizens of some other countries.
Clearview AI, the controversial U.S.-based facial recognition technology firm, is quietly allowing Canadians to check whether their face appears in the company’s massive image database.
Unlike residents of some other countries, however, Canadians do not appear to be eligible to ask for their pictures to be deleted.
Clearview AI first came under scrutiny earlier this year when it boasted about collecting billions of photos from the internet to feed its facial recognition app.
The firm says the tool is meant to allow police to “identify perpetrators and victims of crimes,” but privacy advocates worry the technology could fall into the wrong hands, or lead to a dystopian future in which anyone can be identified within seconds whether they consent to facial recognition or not.
Several law enforcement agencies, from the RCMP to Toronto and Calgary police, acknowledged their members had briefly used the software.
But observers questioned its legality. In February, federal and provincial privacy watchdogs opened an investigation into the use of Clearview AI’s technology in Canada.
Clearview AI, the facial recognition tech firm, has confirmed my face is in their database. I sent them a headshot and they replied with these pictures, along with links to where they got the pics, including a site called “Insta Stalker.” pic.twitter.com/ff5ajAFlg0
Last week, a CBC News reporter submitted a headshot to the company by email and requested they provide all images of him found in the firm’s database. Clearview replied three days later, supplying a PDF file with 12 photos, including several duplicates.
All pictures were closeups of the reporter’s face.Clearview listed where it had first found the images, including official CBC web pages, Twitter, and other services which appear to scrape social media profiles, such as a website called “Insta Stalker.”
Both Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, have told Clearview to stop using images from their platforms for facial recognition.
How to see your pictures in Clearview’s database
“You have the right to request that Clearview AI provides you with copies of your personal data,” the firm’s website states. It says to email the request to privacy-requests@clearview.ai, along with a headshot which will be used for the search.
But getting the pictures removed from the database isn’t quite as easy.
Clearview’s privacy policy says it’s possible to ask for personal data to be deleted, but only “under certain conditions,” depending on local data protection rules. Its website provides forms for residents of