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Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

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Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#41

Post by legalcorrection »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #39
legalcorrection wrote: post #32

It's dubious for Canada to claim worldwide jurisdiction over pictures of Canadians. These two requests, that Clearview "cease collecting, using and disclosing images and biometric facial arrays collected from individuals in Canada" and "delete images and biometric facial arrays collected from individuals in Canada" sound like overreach. Certainly, they can prevent Clearview from doing business inside Canada. Maybe ev…

They aren't claiming worldwide jurisdiction, right? That would be like them saying they'll force clearview to stop business in the US.

My understanding is that they're claiming worldwide jurisdiction over Clearview's use of Canadians' pictures, such that Clearview letting a US client query their database for a picture of a Canadian would be contrary to the order.

Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#42

Post by octoberfranklin »

donkarma wrote: post #12

they don't really have a product outside storing data, an amateur could scrape Facebook and do facial recognition and the only reason it hasn't happened yet is because of how expensive the storage would be

Actually scraping Facebook is really difficult. They have some of the most aggressive browser-fingerprinting out there. Archive.is gave up trying because their facebook accounts kept getting restricted, and each new account needed a new SIM card to sign up so they aren't free..

Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#43

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

legalcorrection wrote: post #41
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't claiming worldwide jurisdiction, right? That would be like them saying they'll force clearview to stop business in the US.

My understanding is that they're claiming worldwide jurisdiction over Clearview's use of Canadians' pictures, such that Clearview letting a US client query their database for a picture of a Canadian would be contrary to the order.

If a canadian takes a picture of a canadian in canada, for example, it's canadian jurisdiction. And so long as any consequences for breaking it are limited to canada as well, it seems like it's still just canadian jurisdiction. It's not like they're trying to extradite the CEO for what they did in the US, or provide any extra-canadian consequences, right?

Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#44

Post by eps »

legalcorrection wrote: post #41
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't claiming worldwide jurisdiction, right? That would be like them saying they'll force clearview to stop business in the US.

My understanding is that they're claiming worldwide jurisdiction over Clearview's use of Canadians' pictures, such that Clearview letting a US client query their database for a picture of a Canadian would be contrary to the order.

Clearview is expected to not collect or use pictures of Canadians, presumably taken on the Canadian soil.

That's a perfectly reasonable request.

Just like Google is not allowed to provide street view of certain locations due to local privacy laws. Exact same thing here.

Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#45

Post by jabbany »

legalcorrection wrote: post #40
bawolff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not that different from how eu claims that gdpr applies to all european citizens even if living abroad.

Also of highly dubious legality. Would be interesting to see what would happen if an EU member state pursued damages on that angle and then tried to enforce the judgment in a US court. I would expect a US court would refuse to give it effect due to the other country exceeding the appropriate exercise of jurisdiction under international law.

And this is part of the reason why places like China have things like the GFW. Because they know that the US would never cooperate with even relatively benign things like foreign privacy laws (let alone more controversial things), so best ban them from the domestic network altogether.

PS: I have no intention of condoning the behavior of building censor networks like the GFW, but until there is some international court to adjudicate Internet jurisdiction cases, my prediction of the future is that there will be more and more countries adopting technological countermeasures and the Internet will be increasingly fragmented.

Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#46

Post by tablespoon »

mthoms wrote: post #36
towe12301923 wrote: post #29

> The commissioners found Clearview scraped images of faces and associated data from publicly accessible online sources (including social media) and stored it in its database. > What the commissioners recommended was that Clearview: > • cease offering facial recognition services to Canadian clients; > • cease collecting, using and disclosing images and biometric facial arrays collected from individuals in Canada, and…

>Clearview claims that they have stopped selling to Canadian clients but they don't know where the people in the images are from. Probably true if they're just scraping images, but their argument seems to be "innocence by ignorance". This part of their defence is outright laughable. What's the point of having this sort of database without the associated metadata?

> This part of their defence is outright laughable. What's the point of having this sort of database without the associated metadata?

I'm not a fan of Clearview AI, but I understand it's still useful even for faces that aren't explicitly tied to an identity in the system, because the if the police know where the matched photo is from, they can do the legwork to fill in the missing details.

I think one of the examples in an early article about it had the police feeding a suspect's face into it. The system found a match in the background of some photo taken at a trade show (the guy was working a both). It only knew the website the photo was from, which allowed the police the identify the trade show, which allowed them to track down the people working at that booth to find their suspect.

Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#47

Post by kurthr »

tablespoon wrote: post #46
mthoms wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Clearview claims that they have stopped selling to Canadian clients but they don't know where the people in the images are from. Probably true if they're just scraping images, but their argument seems to be "innocence by ignorance". This part of their defence is outright laughable. What's the point of having this sort of database without the associated metadata?

> This part of their defence is outright laughable. What's the point of having this sort of database without the associated metadata? I'm not a fan of Clearview AI, but I understand it's still useful even for faces that aren't explicitly tied to an identity in the system, because the if the police know where the matched photo is from, they can do the legwork to fill in the missing details. I think one of the examples…

The point being... _they then know where it's from_, that's the metadata. If they know the trade show, then they know where and when it was, whether it was in Canada and whether they need to delete it.

Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#48

Post by toofy »

I don’t know enough about Canadian IP law, but I assume they have protections for owners of images and maybe even for the subjects of the images.

clearview claims they can’t determine if a picture was taken in Canada or if the subjects are Canadian—if this is true, then they likely can’t determine if they have any legal right to be using the images in the first place.

It seems to me that the diligence should absolutely fall on clearview to determine if they’re lawfully using these images in every jurisdiction. I know there are many jurisdictions around the world and each will have their own laws but I mean, come on, this is common practice for every company in existence. For them to claim “we can’t follow the laws” is absurd.

Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#49

Post by tablespoon »

kurthr wrote: post #47
tablespoon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This part of their defence is outright laughable. What's the point of having this sort of database without the associated metadata? I'm not a fan of Clearview AI, but I understand it's still useful even for faces that aren't explicitly tied to an identity in the system, because the if the police know where the matched photo is from, they can do the legwork to fill in the missing details. I think one of the examples…

The point being... _they then know where it's from_, that's the metadata. If they know the trade show, then they know where and when it was, whether it was in Canada and whether they need to delete it.

> The point being... _they then know where it's from_, that's the metadata. If they know the trade show, then they know where and when it was, whether it was in Canada and whether they need to delete it.

In most cases they probably only know the URL, and it's far from trivial (or even possible in a general case) to mechanically derive if photo was taken in Canada from that.

Personally I hope they're forced to overshoot and delete far more than necessary to ensure compliance (e.g. only keep photos they can positively determine were taken outside of Canada).

Re: Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

#50

Post by nickff »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #43
legalcorrection wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that they're claiming worldwide jurisdiction over Clearview's use of Canadians' pictures, such that Clearview letting a US client query their database for a picture of a Canadian would be contrary to the order.

If a canadian takes a picture of a canadian in canada, for example, it's canadian jurisdiction. And so long as any consequences for breaking it are limited to canada as well, it seems like it's still just canadian jurisdiction. It's not like they're trying to extradite the CEO for what they did in the US, or provide any extra-canadian consequences, right?

You're talking about extending Canadian copyright rules internationally, which isn't how copyright works. Copyright varies a lot.
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