An Australian privacy authority has ordered facial recognition company Clearview AI to stop scanning Australians’ faces and destroy …
An Australian privacy authority has ordered facial recognition company Clearview AI to stop scanning Australians’ faces and destroy images and related data it has already collected.
It’s the latest challenge from the New York-based startup that has angered privacy advocates around the world over its practice of ‘scraping’ photos from social media to identify people wanted by police and other government agencies.
Australian Information and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk said on Wednesday the company had violated the privacy of Australians by extracting their personal data from the web and disclosing it through its facial recognition tool.
“The covert collection of this type of sensitive information is unreasonably intrusive and unfair,” Falk said in a written statement. “This carries a significant risk of harm to individuals, including vulnerable groups such as children and victims of crime. “
Falk’s office and his UK counterpart jointly launched an investigation into Clearview last year.
The Australian regulator said it was ordering the company “to stop collecting facial images and biometric models of people in Australia, and to destroy existing images and models collected in Australia.” In this case, biometric models are digital or mathematical representations derived from images that can be compared to a database.
Clearview said on Wednesday it was appealing the decision and challenged the regulator’s jurisdiction over the company, which does not operate in Australia or have no customers there. Clearview, however, had provided tests of its tool to some Australian police forces, including the Federal Police, but halted those tests after the regulator began its investigation.
Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That, describing himself as a dual citizen of the United States and Australia, where he grew up, said in an emailed statement that he was discouraged that the Australian regulator had misinterpreted the value of its technology in helping law enforcement solve “heinous crimes”.
The company has widely defied demands from big tech companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to stop collecting images from their users.
Facebook said on Tuesday it would shut down its own facial recognition system and remove the facial prints of more than a billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.
Clearview boasted of having a much larger collection of “over 10 billion facial images, the largest known database of its kind” and that all are publicly available and legally obtained from sources. online information, websites and social media. It signed a contract last year with U.S. immigration officials and recently submitted its technology to a U.S. standards authority to verify its accuracy.
Clearview has faced a number of challenges, including lawsuits in the United States and scrutiny from US lawmakers and European and Canadian regulators.
Clearview ceased operations in Canada last year. Privacy commissioners have asked the company this year to delete data on Canadian citizens, with one commissioner arguing that the system puts all Canadians “permanently in a police queue.”
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