By Byron Kaye
SYDNEY (Reuters) – An Australian regulator on Wednesday ordered U.S. facial recognition software company Clearview AI Inc to stop collecting images from websites and destroy data collected in the country after an investigation found it breached privacy laws.
Privately owned Clearview, which cross-references photos scraped from social media websites with a database of billions of images, collected Australians’ sensitive information without consent and without checking whether its matches were accurate, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) said.
The practices fell “well short of Australians’ expectations” and carried “significant risk of harm to individuals, including vulnerable groups such as children and victims of crime, whose images can be searched on Clearview AI’s database”, Information Commissioner Angelene Falk said in a statement.
“The covert collection of this kind of sensitive information is unreasonably intrusive and unfair,” she added.
The move shows a growing pushback by regulators against the controversial technology, which is being used or tested by law enforcement agencies around the world. In June, a Canadian regulator found that country’s police broke the law by using Clearview’s technology until it was banned there.
The OAIC is itself investigating the Australian Federal Police (AFP) over a trial of Clearview software it ran between October 2019 and March 2020. The office added on Wednesday that it was still finalising that investigation.
Overnight, Facebook Inc said it was shutting down its facial recognition software, saying “regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules”.
Representatives of the AFP and Clearview were not immediately available for comment.
In Australia, the regulator ordered Clearview to “cease collecting facial images and biometric templates from individuals in Australia, and to destroy existing images and templates collected from Australia”.
Australia’s OAIC has no power to issue penalties or fines for privacy breaches, but said this year in a review of the country’s privacy laws that the threat of penalties would “send a strong message about the importance of privacy compliance”.
The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office, which worked with the Australians on the Clearview investigation, said it was still considering next steps because the countries have different privacy laws.
(Reporting by Byron Kaye. Editing by Gerry Doyle)
