Update: Clearview AI Requests

We've reached out to Clearview AI to remind them of their legal obligations and to see if they're planning on fulfilling the requests.

Last month, we launched a tool that helps people living in Canada to exercise their privacy and information rights by easily submitting requests to Clearview AI, the problematic facial recognition technology company that had been doing business with law enforcement agencies all across Canada.

The tool uses Canada’s private sector privacy law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, to make a legal request to the company for personal information. It asks the company if this information has been shared with other organizations and, should it have been shared, who those other organizations are. And it also asks Clearview AI to delete any personal information it might possess.

Even though Clearview AI claims that it no longer has any Canadian clients, our own requests to the company revealed they were still in possession of the personal information of Canadians and are likely making this information available to their clients elsewhere in the world. For this reason, the company is still subject to Canadian privacy laws.

More than 3,000 people in our community have used the tool to submit requests to Clearview AI. At the end of this month (August) the legislated timeframe of thirty business days will come to a close. From what we’ve heard, the vast majority of these requests have gone unfulfilled.

So we’ve sent a letter to Clearview AI asking them if they intend to respond to these requests and reminding them of their legal responsibility to do so. We’ve also asked them how they intend to satisfy the deletion requests given our understanding of how their system and business model operates.

We look forward to receiving a reply from Clearview AI and to providing our community members with an update on this campaign soon.