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OTTAWA Privacy watchdogs say U.S. firm Clearview AI’s facial-recognition technology resulted in mass surveillance of Canadians and violated federal and provincial laws governing personal information.
In a report Wednesday with three provincial counterparts, federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien said the New York-based company’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the internet was a clear violation of Canadians’ privacy rights.
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Clearview AI’s technology allows for the collection of huge numbers of images from various sources that can help police forces, financial institutions and other clients identify people.
“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.’
Article content
OTTAWA Privacy watchdogs say U.S. firm Clearview AI’s facial-recognition technology resulted in mass surveillance of Canadians and violated federal and provincial laws governing personal information.
In a report Wednesday with three provincial counterparts, federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien said the New York-based company’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the internet was a clear violation of Canadians’ privacy rights.
We apologize, but this video has failed to load.
Try refreshing your browser, or Facial recognition tool used by RCMP deemed mass surveillance of unwitting Canadians Back to video
Clearview AI’s technology allows for the collection of huge numbers of images from various sources that can help police forces, financial institutions and other clients identify people.
Here are the top Canadian telecom stories of 2020
From 5G launches to new legislation, 2020 brought quite a bit of telecom news
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) kicked off major telecom news for the year when it held hearings for its review of mobile wireless services in February.
Despite the world being turned upside down shortly after, telecom news didnât stop amid the COVID-19 pandemic. There were numerous noteworthy things, such as initial 5G network launches, new legislation and calls for reformed privacy laws amid the growing digital sector.
There was quite a lot of telecom news in Canada this past year, so hereâs a round-up of a few of the most important stories that will continue into 2021.
Largest financial-data breach in Canada due to security gaps: privacy watchdog By Jolson Lim. Published on Dec 14, 2020 1:21pm Desjardins Group offices in Montreal (Paju/Wikimedia Commons)
The personal data of nearly 9.7 million Canadians was stolen between 2017 and 2019 due to gaps in the security at Desjardins, the largest federation of credit unions in North America, Canada’s privacy commissioner reported on Monday.
Personal information, including first and last names, birthdays, social insurance numbers, residential addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses, was stolen in the largest-ever data breach in the history of the Canadian financial-services sector.
Rather than a complex external hacking operation, an internal employee easily gained access to the data through a shared drive.