Comment by Daniel Therrien

Clearview sells a facial recognition tool that allows law enforcement and commercial organizations to match photographs of unknown people against a massive databank of 3 billion images, scraped from the Internet. The vast majority of these people have never been, and will never be, implicated in any crime. What Clearview does is mass surveillance and it is illegal. It is an affront to individuals’ privacy rights and inflicts broad-based harm on all members of society, who find themselves continually in a police lineup. This is completely unacceptable. For its part, Clearview has put forward a series of arguments based on the law’s current approach that privacy rights and commercial interests must be balanced against one another. The company essentially claims that individuals who placed or permitted their images to be placed on the Internet lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in such images, that the information was publicly available, and that the company’s appropriate business interests and freedom of expression should prevail. My colleagues and I think these arguments must be rejected.