BAKER

CANADA BANS BREAKTHROUGH APP FOR INVESTIGATING CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE CRIMES

[could anons use this tech to I.D. repeat crisis actors, Antifa / BLM agents provocateurs posing as MAGA, etc. via such tech?]

Feb. 3, 2021

The facial recognition app Clearview AI is not welcome in Canada and the company that developed it should delete Canadians’ faces from its database, the country’s privacy commissioner said on Wednesday.

“What Clearview does is mass surveillance, and it is illegal,” Commissioner Daniel Therrien said at a news conference. He forcefully denounced the company as putting all of society “continually in a police lineup.” Though the Canadian government does not have legal authority to enforce photo removal, the position — the strongest one an individual country has taken against the company — was clear: “This is completely unacceptable.”

Clearview scraped more than three billion photos from social media networks and other public websites in order to build a facial recognition app that is now used by over 2,400 U.S. law enforcement agencies, according to the company. When an officer runs a search, the app provides links to sites on the web where the person’s face has appeared. The scope of the company’s reach and law enforcement application was first reported by The New York Times in January 2020. …

Dozens oflaw enforcement agenciesand organizations across Canada used the app, according to the commissioners, including the nationalRoyal Canadian Mounted Police.One Canadian law enforcement officer told The Times last year that it was“the biggest breakthrough in the last decade”forinvestigating child sexual abuse crimes.“Thousands of searches” were conducted, a report from the commissioners said, but only one agency was paying for the app, mainly because a number of groups used it through a free trial.

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