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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

#51

Post by wongarsu »

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.

Countries enforce laws on people/organizations they don't have jurisdiction over all the time. Usually it ends up with the country not being able to do anything about it until the convicted is doing business in that country, has assets there or is stepping foot into it (in the case of organizations: when a representative goes to that country).

Having another countries court enforce a judgement is the exception, it usually only happens if there's a treaty to that effect (like with copyright law).

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

#52

Post by nickff »

eps wrote: post #44
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.

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.

There's a bit of a hitch, as a photo can be legally taken, and legally transferred to a non-Canadian entity, at which point things get problematic. Canadian copyright and privacy rules don't usually apply to foreign entities.

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

#53

Post by noah_buddy »

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.

Legality at the root is what a nation or union of nations is able to enforce. Perhaps GPDR is not legal in the case law, but I see cookie banners on most sites I visit these days.

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

#54

Post by csdvrx »

eps wrote: post #44
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.

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 copyright, like use right, certain rights you can't sign away, etc.

Even worse: by being able to correlate that to Canadian individuals (using metadata or facial metrics, etc), the company can't pretend they don't know who these pictures are from, or where they come from: they know damn well, which makes the court requests limited scope even more acceptable.

Also, claiming to be ignorant of Canadian law may not be a good excuse. They should have known, if only to start doing business there.

Let's construct an equivalent: if in ISIS or Afghan territory, a terrorist group had scraped pictures of people living in the EU or US, and known by them to be "enemies of the caliphate" or something equivalent and that's it's totally A-OK within their legal system to publish that on a website say to call for their murder (I must confess my ignorance on these matters but you get the idea), we'd all say "no it's not". This is just the same. What's legal for us to do domestically with domestic pictures of citizens may not be legal to do somewhere else, and importing the pictures to do it domestically doesn't magically make it legal.

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

#55

Post by f311a »

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.

They don't, they just know the original URL. IIRC, they also scrape news websites and it's impossible to automatically and correctly detect the location of a person.

Even if it's from a social network, you still can't be sure. Especially, if a photo have multiple persons.

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

#57

Post by kurthr »

f311a wrote: post #55
kurthr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don't, they just know the original URL. IIRC, they also scrape news websites and it's impossible to automatically and correctly detect the location of a person. Even if it's from a social network, you still can't be sure. Especially, if a photo have multiple persons.

It is so impossible that it is the actual use case they are selling?

" 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

#58

Post by amatecha »

Wait. Why "can't" Clearview comply with the order?

Don't they know the identities of the people whose photos they're scraping and storing? Thus, don't they know if those people are Canadian or not?

Or is Clearview just lazily scraping photos from the web etc. and storing whatever random username or pseudonym is attached to it, giving _that_ in search results? In which case, they should 1000% expect to be taken to task by jurisdictions all around the world for their gross overreach.

Wait, plus, isn't the very premise of their business just 99.99% pure IP infringement? They don't even have the legal right to use images posted online just because they're accessible. They are protected by copyright unless CC or public-domain licensed...

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

#59

Post by meowface »

kurthr wrote: post #57
f311a wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't, they just know the original URL. IIRC, they also scrape news websites and it's impossible to automatically and correctly detect the location of a person. Even if it's from a social network, you still can't be sure. Especially, if a photo have multiple persons.

It is so impossible that it is the actual use case they are selling? " 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."

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 police clicking on a URL in a result and manually investigating to determine the location and having their system automatically determine the location of all photos and delete the ones that are in Canada.

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

#60

Post by Flankk »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #42
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..

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