Teresa Scassa - Blog

Monday, 02 March 2020 08:41

Privacy investigations into Clearview AI in Canada: Old laws and new tech

Written by  Teresa Scassa
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Clearview AI and its controversial facial recognition technology have been making headlines for weeks now. In Canada, the company is under joint investigation by federal and provincial privacy commissioners. The RCMP is being investigated by the federal Privacy Commissioner after having admitted to using Clearview AI. The Ontario privacy commissioner has expressed serious concerns about reports of Ontario police services adopting the technology. In the meantime, the company is dealing with a reported data breach in which hackers accessed its entire client list.

Clearview AI offers facial recognition technology to ‘law enforcement agencies.’ The term is not defined on their site, and at least one newspaper report suggests that it is defined broadly, with private security (for example university campus police) able to obtain access. Clearview AI scrapes images from publicly accessible websites across the internet and compiles them in a massive database. When a client provides them with an image of a person, they use facial recognition algorithms to match the individual in the image with images in its database. Images in the database are linked to their sources which contain other identifying information (for example, they might link to a Facebook profile page). The use of the service is touted as speeding up all manner of investigations by facilitating the identification of either perpetrators or victims of crimes.

This post addresses a number of different issues raised by the Clearview AI controversy, framed around the two different sets of privacy investigations. The post concludes with additional comments about transparency and accountability.

1. Clearview AI & PIPEDA

Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) applies to the collection, use and disclosure of personal information by private sector organizations engaged in commercial activities. Although Clearview AI is a U.S. company, PIPEDA will still apply if there is a sufficient nexus to Canada. In this case, the service clearly captures data about Canadians, and the facial recognition services are marketed to Canadian law enforcement agencies. This should be enough of a connection.

The federal Privacy Commissioner is joined in his investigation by the Commissioners of Quebec, B.C. and Alberta. Each of these provinces has its own private sector data protection laws that apply to organizations that collect, use and disclose personal information within the borders of their respective province. The joint investigation signals the positive level of collaboration and co-operation that exists between privacy commissioners in Canada. However, as I explain in an earlier post, the relevant laws are structured so that only one statute applies to a particular set of facts. This joint investigation may raise important jurisdictional questions similar to those raised in the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica joint investigation and that were not satisfactorily resolved in that case. It is a minor issue, but nonetheless one that is relevant and interesting from a privacy governance perspective.

The federal Commissioner’s investigation will focus on whether Clearview AI complied with PIPEDA when it collected, used and disclosed the personal information which populates its massive database. Clearview AI’s position on the legality of its actions is clearly based on U.S. law. It states on its website that: “Clearview searches the open web. Clearview does not and cannot search any private or protected info, including in your private social media accounts.” In the U.S., there is much less in the way of privacy protection for information in ‘public’ space. In Canada however, the law is different. Although there is an exception in PIPEDA (and in comparable provincial private sector laws) to the requirement of consent for the collection, use or disclosure of “publicly available information”, this exception is cast in narrow terms. It is certainly not broad enough to encompass information shared by individuals through social media. Interestingly, in hearings into PIPEDA reform, the House of Commons ETHI Committee at one point seemed swayed by industry arguments that PIPEDA should be amended to include websites and social media within the exception for “publicly available personal information”. In an earlier post, I argued that this was a dangerous direction in which to head, and the Clearview AI controversy seems to confirm this. Sharing photographs online for the purposes of social interaction should not be taken as consent to use those images in commercial facial recognition technologies. What is more, the law should not be amended to deem it to be so.

To the extent, then, that the database contains personal information of Canadians that was collected without their knowledge or consent, the conclusion will likely be that there has been a breach of PIPEDA. The further use and disclosure of personal information without consent will also amount to a breach. An appropriate remedy would include ordering Clearview AI to remove all personal information of Canadians that was collected without consent from its database. Unfortunately, the federal Commissioner does not have order-making powers. If the investigation finds a breach of PIPEDA, it will still be necessary to go to Federal Court to ask that court to hold its own hearing, reach its own conclusions, and make an order. This is what is currently taking place in relation the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica investigation, and it makes somewhat of a mockery of our privacy laws. Stronger enforcement powers are on the agenda for legislative reform of PIPEDA, and it is to be hoped that something will be done about this before too long.

 

2. The Privacy Act investigation

The federal Privacy Commissioner has also launched an investigation into the RCMP’s now admitted use of Clearview AI technology. The results of this investigation should be interesting.

The federal Privacy Act was drafted for an era in which government institution generally collected the information they needed and used from individuals. Governments, in providing all manner of services, would compile significant amounts of data, and public sector privacy laws set the rules for governance of this data. These laws were not written for our emerging context in which government institutions increasingly rely on data analytics and data-fueled AI services provided by the private sector. In the Clearview AI situation, it is not the RCMP that has collected a massive database of images for facial recognition. Nor has the RCMP contracted with a private sector company to build this service for it. Instead, it is using Clearview AI’s services to make presumably ad hoc inquiries, seeking identity information in specific instances. It is not clear whether or how the federal Privacy Act will apply in this context. If the focus is on the RCMP’s ‘collection’ and ‘use’ of personal information, it is arguable that this is confined to the details of each separate query, and not to the use of facial recognition on a large scale. The Privacy Act might simply not be up to addressing how government institutions should interact with these data-fuelled private sector services.

The Privacy Act is, in fact, out of date and clearly acknowledged to be so. The Department of Justice has been working on reforms and has attempted some initial consultation. But the Privacy Act has not received the same level of public and media attention as has PIPEDA. And while we might see reform of PIPEDA in the not too distant future, reform of the Privacy Act may not make it onto the legislative agenda of a minority government. If this is the case, it will leave us with another big governance gap for the digital age.

If the Privacy Act is not to be reformed any time soon, it will be very interesting to see what the Privacy Commissioner’s investigation reveals. The interpretation of section 6(2) of the Privacy Act could be of particular importance. It provides that: “A government institution shall take all reasonable steps to ensure that personal information that is used for an administrative purpose by the institution is as accurate, up-to-date and complete as possible.” In 2018 the Supreme Court of Canada issued a rather interesting decision in Ewert v. Canada, which I wrote about here. The case involved a Métis man’s challenge to the use of actuarial risk-assessment tests by Correctional Services Canada to make decisions related to his incarceration. He argued that the tests were “developed and tested on predominantly non-Indigenous populations and that there was no research confirming that they were valid when applied to Indigenous persons.” (at para 12). The Corrections and Conditional Release Act contained language very similar to s. 6(2) of the Privacy Act. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that this language placed an onus on the CSC to ensure that all of the data it relied upon in its decision-making about inmates met that standard – including the data generated from the use of the assessment tools. This ruling may have very interesting implications not just for the investigation into the RCMP’s use of Clearview’s technology, but also for public sector use of private sector data-fueled analytics and AI where those tools are based upon personal data. The issue is whether, in this case, the RCMP is responsible for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the data generated by a private sector AI system on which they rely.

One final note on the use of Clearview AI’s services by the RCMP – and by other police services in Canada. A look at Clearview AI’s website reveals its own defensiveness about its technologies, which it describes as helping “to identify child molesters, murderers, suspected terrorists, and other dangerous people quickly, accurately, and reliably to keep our families and communities safe.” Police service representatives have also responded defensively to media inquiries, and their admissions of use come with very few details. If nothing else, this situation highlights the crucial importance of transparency, oversight and accountability in relation to these technologies that have privacy and human rights implications. Transparency can help to identify and examine concerns, and to ensure that the technologies are accurate, reliable and free from bias. Policies need to be put in place to reflect clear decisions about what crimes or circumstances justify the use of these technologies (and which ones do not). Policies should specify who is authorized to make the decision to use this technology and according to what criteria. There should be record-keeping and an audit trail. Keep in mind that technologies of this kind, if unsupervised, can be used to identify, stalk or harass strangers. It is not hard to imagine someone use this technology to identify a person seen with an ex-spouse, or even to identify an attractive woman seen at a bar. They can also be used to identify peaceful protestors. The potential for misuse is enormous. Transparency, oversight and accountability are essential if these technologies are to be used responsibly. The sheepish and vague admissions of use of Clearview AI technology by Canadian police services is a stark reminder that there is much governance work to be done around such technologies in Canada even beyond privacy law issues.

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