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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

#81

Post by rory »

wyre wrote: post #78
Nextgrid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The internet has always stretched through many different legal jurisdictions. Back in the early days this wasn't a problem in practice because internet-based entities were operating in good faith, so even if the legal landscape was murky, nobody had a need to resort to it. This has now changed as companies are now acting in bad faith doing things many find reprehensible, and a legal precedent and/or a change in law…

> This has now changed as companies are now acting in bad faith I wonder what the major impetus for the change has been. Is it akin to having a million monkeys guided by money on computers, eventually one of them will write code enabling a fascist internet?

Sort of. Originally, it was just hackers making things on the internet. Now, it's the most popular way to make money in the world. So if there's a way to make money doing something reprehensible on the internet, someone reprehensible will find it and do it.

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

#82

Post by tremon »

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?

Also, it opens up a very simple avenue for the watchdog: they might require Clearview to delete any data for which they can't prove that it's not Canadian.

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

#84

Post by tremon »

stefan_ wrote: post #28
imglorp wrote: post #4

We've created a mess of legal jurisdiction and geography that is difficult to reconcile with globally distributed systems. BC and Clearview both have a point. But which jurisdiction is in play? Is it the one where the person lives or where the picture was taken? Was it the company that took the picture, one of a dozen networks in play, the one that transmitted it to a server, or the one that aggregated it into a data…

I don't understand, the law is clear: the set of all of those .

Is that set an intersection or a union?

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

#85

Post by tremon »

Flankk wrote: post #60
octoberfranklin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

You also don't have a right to make copies. That all changes if you purchase the data.

Yes, you do. It's a natural right, not limited by either the constitution or copyright law. You cannot distribute your copies, that is all.

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

#86

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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.

Ultimately, a country can regardless of what any other country says... ban a company from doing business within their borders, confiscate property within their borders, arrest employees within their borders, and prohibit employees or products from entering their borders.

Arguably, tech companies could just disregard GDPR, at the expense of all business, offices, and access to the European Union. However, if they want to continue to have that access, they need to comply with the EU's laws, even if someone could argue that those laws extend in dubious ways outside the borders.

The thing about national sovereignty, of which each EU member state has, and to some degree, the EU as a whole is capable of exacting, is that you can't decide whether you think their laws are reasonable or not, you can only decide if you're willing to comply in exchange for access to that market.

Bear in mind, the US literally tells people "you can't do business in Iran", and everyone accepts it, because the alternative of "you can't do business in the US" is way worse for business.

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

#87

Post by legalcorrection »

csdvrx wrote: post #54
eps wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As much as I dislike legal overreach in international matters, I agree: the pictures of Canadian individuals are likely to have been taken in Canada, or to come from Canadian sources or websites. The fact that they may have been shared with a US company (ex: Facebook, LinkedIn) is irrelevant: copyright etc. does not cease to exist when crossing a digital border. Some countries also have extra protections on top of co…

Telling your followers to kill someone in another country is considered committing a crime in that country. Distributing information that at some point originated in another country is generally not. Where it is, it's because of something like a copyright treaty.

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

#88

Post by legalcorrection »

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?

That's not really how it works. A judgment is kind of a universal thing. It is a right to the the value of the judgment and you can assert it in any number of ways. If you have a judgment against a foreign company, and that company temporarily has some assets in a bank in the country that issued the judgment, you can get a court order to have them seized. You can also go to other countries and enforce that judgment. If I sue you in the UK and win, but I can't adequately enforce the judgment in the UK because all of your assets are in another country, I can generally go to that other country and ask a court there to enforce the judgment. One of the main things that court will look into is whether the court that issued the judgment was acting properly under international law in the first place.

A country that issues a judgment beyond the scope of its jurisdiction under international law is violating international law. There's no international police to come get you, but you're not operating by the rules of the road and foreign countries will start to look at judgments originating in your country with suspicion. If you aggressively enforce illegally extraterritorial judgments, such as by seizing the assets of foreign actors that are just passing through your company, you might even get into tit-for-tats with other countries.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction is not totally illegal, but there are limits and this would seem to be outside of those.

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

#89

Post by cbsmith »

shkkmo wrote: post #73
meowface wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as evidence I'm not defending them, I find their project totally unethical, and the owners and their associates are also highly involved with internet fascism and credential phishing (I know the source isn't the best, but I recommend reading the article): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/clearview-ai-facial-recogniti... With that said: the order is clearly impossible to execute. There's a huge difference between p…

> With that said: the order is clearly impossible to execute. It is clearly possible to execute, it would just require much higher costs per image that ClearView processes and the probable need for ClearView to avoid using any images that they can't verify the location of in am economical fashion. Saying it is "impossible" is different from saying that the costs of compliance would fundamentally change ClearView's bu…

I think at that point most people would consider it a very different kind of service.

You don't need the Internet or AI to collate pictures and the data on them into a database.

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

#90

Post by martin8412 »

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?

Then they can delete their database and start over. Not knowing something doesn't excuse someone from responsibility.
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