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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

#101

Post by hiptobecubic »

dogleash wrote: post #17
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…

>Laws really need to catch up to the tech which has far outpaced them. None of this is new, or specific to tech, this is just how companies try to end-run the law. How exactly would you propose changing jurisdictional boundaries and/or rules? Subjecting people to more governments that are not the ones for the areas in which they're operating? Removing the ability for some local areas to have control over the business…

What if they put out warrants for anyone involved and arrested them if they ever went to Canada? Extradition is probably off the table, but I think really the way to disincentivize this kind of garbage is at some level to hold people accountable for what their company does.

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

#102

Post by hiptobecubic »

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…

I think they are saying, "You did this in Canada and it was illegal and now you need to undo it," no? Not "We reserve the right to delete any picture of a Canadian person taken anywhere in the world."

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

#103

Post by hiptobecubic »

ulrashida wrote: post #75

To customers: "Uncover leads, insights, & relationships you never knew existed." To regulators: "Where did all these pictures come from? It's impossible to say."

I really don't understand why they think that would be a suitable defense anyway? "It is too expensive for us to figure out if we're breaking the law, sorry."

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

#104

Post by kazinator »

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.

You might have misunderstood tablespoon's remark:

"if the police know where the matched photo is from"

The "matched photo" is the right argument in the function

  match(photo_scraped_by_clearview, photo_of_interest)
The matched photo is some piece of evidence the police already have from some investigation, e.g. surveillance camera or whatever. They know exactly where they got it. This is matched against the Clearview AI database. So then that match attaches information to the Clearview AI photo. They may be able to figure out where that was taken, since it is narrowed down.

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

#105

Post by volkl48 »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #100
cbsmith wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but the point is that their business is not viable then. If it's illegal to serve childporn and imgur can't profitably detect if it's serving childporn or not, then imgur is doomed. I think no one would dispute that?

Depends, what level of accuracy are you demanding?

If the answer is 100%, then yes, all user-generated content on the internet will have to be banned unless subject to manual human review before allowing the post to be seen, and even that is probably not perfect.

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

#106

Post by lopis »

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 last ones I want to "help" with this data is the police, known for misuse of tech since forever.

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

#107

Post by legalcorrection »

csdvrx wrote: post #99
legalcorrection wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's legal in their country, who are we to tell them to change their laws?

Sorry, I'm not sure what your point is.

There is an area of customary international law that deals with the proper exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Encyclopedia entry here (paywalled) https://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/... Someone seems to have mirrored the first page of the entry here https://ilcfhuns.wixsite.com/ilcfhuns/single-post/2018/03/07...

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

#108

Post by legalcorrection »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #86
legalcorrection wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're right in that international law isn't real in the same way that national laws are. But countries do consider international law in determining whether to give effect to another country's actions. If EU member states started seizing assets of businesses that it applied the GDPR to in violation of international laws, other countries would take that as a hostile action and possibly stop recognizing EU member state judgments, for example, as presumptively valid. And they can take retaliatory actions against European companies.

Customary international law is best thought of as widely accepted norms of fairness between sovereign states. There is no international police to come get you when you don't play nice, but staying within the dictates of international law generally protects you from accusations of unfair play and the consequences that can bring.

And yeah, the US maybe does violate international law in the specifics of its sanctions policies, though they are usually carefully crafted to only apply to people who somehow participate in the US financial/payments system. It's very possible that one day the US will pay the price for this overreach/maximalism when countries eagerly jump ship to an alternative international financial system, should a viable one emerge. But for now, the US is the only real game in town. The strong take what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

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

#110

Post by parasense »

tkfu wrote: post #24
parasense wrote: post #2

I feel like this is a very common delusion, the expectation of privacy when going into public. It's like public photography. Some folks get really upset if their photo is taken out in public without consent, but those folks were out in public so zero expectation of privacy. Same exact thing for the Internet.

It might be a "common delusion" where you live (I'm guessing the US), but in every country I've lived in (n=6), it's an accurate understanding of basic privacy law. You can't just go and take someone's photo without their permission, even if they're in a public place.

Nonesense...

* What about looking at people with one's own eyes, without the express consent of other people?

* What about people with photographic memory, who are effectively walking cameras?

* What about artists who draw pictures of people they see in public?

Where does this nonsense ever end? While the question is hyperbolic, and I apologize, that's intentional use of the "Reducto absurdum" fallacy to help illustrate the absurdity of this kind of idea.

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