Canadian Privacy Commissioner Finds RCMP Use of Clearview AI Facial Recognition Violated Canada’s Privacy Act

June 10, 2021

In a report to Parliament the Canadian Privacy Commissioner concluded that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RMCP) violated the Canadian Privacy Act by using Clearview AI's facial recognition project. The Commissioner's report follows a February 2021 investigative report that Clearview AI violated Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act by scraping images off social media sites to create a facial recognition database so that "billions of people essentially found themselves in a '24/7' police line-up." Recently, in an open letter EPIC and a coalition of more than 175 civil society organizations and prominent individuals called for "an outright ban on uses of facial recognition and remote biometric recognition technologies that enable mass surveillance and discriminatory targeted surveillance."

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