“What Clearview does is mass surveillance and it is illegal,” Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien said. “It is completely unacceptable for millions of people who will never be implicated in any crime to find themselves continually in a police lineup.”
They said Clearview AI’s technology allowed law enforcement and commercial organizations to match photographs of unknown people against the company’s databank of more than three billion images for investigation purposes.
That included millions of Canadian images, they said, adding people did not place their images online for that collection purpose, meaning the law was broken.
The American Civil Liberties Union has called such collections, ‘faceprinting.’