Appeals Court confirms Clearview AI biometric data collection violates BC privacy law

A British Columbia Appeal Court will not overturn a ruling by the B.C. Supreme Court in support of the province’s privacy commissioner, which found facial recognition provider Clearview AI to be in violation of local privacy law when it scraped images of B.C. residents from social media for its databases.

A report from the Vancouver Sun says the court dismissed an appeal from the U.S. tech company to have a 2021 three-part order from the commissioner ruled unreasonable.

Until 2020, Clearview AI provided facial recognition services for the RCMP. It stopped after B.C. joined the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in launching an investigation into the company’s collection of biometric data and disclosure, and ordered it to cease collecting, using and disclosing the images and to delete any images of B.C. residents that it had already added to its database of more than 30 billion faces.

The joint privacy commissioners called it “mass surveillance” and “a clear violation of the privacy rights of Canadians.”

Clearview AI’s most recent objection argued that its activities are not covered by B.C. privacy law, because it doesn’t “have a connection to the province” and because the images were publicly posted on social media, negating the need for consent to collect them. The company says it is “entirely indifferent” to where it gets its data; and that, per the Sun, “its success as a business depends on its ability to acquire facial data on a global scale to build its databank.” It says it can’t shield B.C. from its image crawler’s activities, and can’t go back and remove all the pictures of British Columbians that it has already scraped.

The case doesn’t fly for Justice Karen Horsman, who, writing on behalf of Justice Nitya Iyer and Justice Paul Riley, affirms that B.C.’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) does, indeed, apply.

“Clearview’s position that PIPA is constitutionally inapplicable to it means that it, and any other company that acquires personal information on the internet using a global search engine, would be immune from domestic privacy laws,” says the judge. “This would significantly compromise the ability of jurisdictions such as B.C. to protect personal information on the internet.”

Besides which, Horsman says, Clearview complied (see bottom of page 3) when an Illinois lawsuit under BIPA ordered it to stop collecting images and block client searches from examining the data of state residents in its database. The judge sees no reason Clearview shouldn’t be able to do the same for B.C.

Last year, the Federal Court of Appeal revived a proposed class action against the facial recognition firm.

The proposed class includes “all Canadian residents or citizens who are authors of photographs collected by Clearview AI and who have not assigned or licensed their copyrights, as well as individuals or entities to whom those copyrights had been assigned or licensed.” That means anyone whose face biometrics ended up in Clearview’s database could be eligible.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is formally integrating Clearview AI’s facial recognition platform into its intelligence and targeting operations.

Article Topics

biometric data  |  British Columbia  |  Canada  |  Clearview AI  |  data collection  |  data privacy  |  facial recognition  |  lawsuits  |  Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC)