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An investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has found that New York–based technology company Clearview AI contravened federal and provincial privacy laws by engaging in “mass surveillance” of Canadians and sharing information from their facial recognition technology with law enforcement, including Toronto police.

In a report released on Wednesday, Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien says Clearview allowed law enforcement and commercial organizations “to match photographs of unknown people against the company’s databank of more than 3 billion images,” including children, scraped from the internet.

The Privacy Commissioner’s report says that under Canadian privacy laws people have a “reasonable expectation” that photographs they may post on the internet or that are posted by others will not be used by third parties for “identification purposes”. The Privacy Commissioner says consent is required. But his report says Clearview did not attempt to receive consent for use of the images collected by users of their services.

The investigation, which included the offices of the privacy commissioners of Québec, British Columbia, and Alberta, found that “Clearview collected, used and disclosed Canadians’ personal information for inappropriate purposes”. Those purposes include the “creation of biometric facial recognition arrays” for law enforcement.

The Privacy Commissioner’s office says it presented its findings to Clearview. And that Clearview argued, among other things, that the information they were using was “publicly available” and that “significant harm is unlikely to occur for individuals” from its sharing of information with law enforcement.

But the Privacy Commissioner’s report states that “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’ exemption in privacy laws.”

Clearview also argued, according to the Privacy Commissioner, that Canadian laws do not apply to the company because it “does not have a ‘real and substantial connection’ to Canada.”

But the Privacy Commissioner’s report says the company “actively marketed” its services to law enforcement in Canada, including the RCMP. (A related investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner into the RCMP’s use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology remains open.) According to the Privacy Commissioner’s report, Clearview had accounts with some 48 law enforcement “and other organizations” in Canada.

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