Three billion faces without permission

In February 2021, four privacy authorities published the findings of a joint investigation: the federal Office of the Privacy Commissioner, Quebec's Commission d'accès à l'information and their counterparts in British Columbia and Alberta. Their subject: the American company Clearview AI, which had scraped more than three billion images of faces from the Internet, including those of a great many people in Canada, children included, to sell a facial recognition tool.

The commissioners concluded that this amounted to mass identification and surveillance, carried out without consent. In Canada, 48 accounts had been opened for police forces and other organizations. The company had left the Canadian market in July 2020, during the investigation, but it refused the commissioners' recommendations.

In December 2021, the Commission d'accès à l'information ordered Clearview to stop collecting images of Quebecers without their consent and to destroy, within 90 days, those already collected.

What stands out is the common voice. From one end of the country to the other, institutions recalled that a face is not a raw material. It belongs to a person, and to the community that recognizes and protects them.