{"id":260320,"date":"2021-05-27T13:24:26","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T10:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/eu-privacy-groups-set-sights-on-facial-recognition-firm\/"},"modified":"2021-05-27T13:24:26","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T10:24:26","slug":"eu-privacy-groups-set-sights-on-facial-recognition-firm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/eu-privacy-groups-set-sights-on-facial-recognition-firm\/","title":{"rendered":"#EU privacy groups set sights on facial recognition firm"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#EU privacy groups set sights on facial recognition firm<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\"Critics
\n Critics say facial recognition risks eliminating anonymity in public spaces.
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Privacy organisations on Thursday complained to regulators in five European countries over the practices of Clearview AI, a company that has built a powerful facial recognition database using images “scraped” from the web.<\/p>\n

Clearview’s use of images\u2014including those from people’s social media<\/a> accounts\u2014to offer biometrics services to private companies and law enforcement “goes far beyond what we could ever expect as online users”, Ioannis Kouvakas, legal officer at Privacy International, said in a statement.<\/p>\n

While Clearview touts its technology<\/a>’s ability to help law enforcement, its critics say facial recognition is open to abuse and could ultimately eliminate anonymity in public spaces\u2014pointing to cases like China’s massive public surveillance system.<\/p>\n

Facial recognition has also been attacked for failing to distinguish non-white people’s faces and women as well as it can identify white, male images\u2014potentially leading to false positives.<\/p>\n

Alongside three other digital rights organisations, PI has filed complaints with data regulators in France, Austria, Italy, Greece and Britain.<\/p>\n

“We expect them to join forces in ruling that Clearview’s practices have no place in Europe, which would have meaningful ramifications for the company’s operations globally,” PI said.<\/p>\n

In February, Canada’s privacy commissioner found that the firm’s activity “is mass surveillance and it is illegal” under the country’s privacy laws.<\/p>\n

And British and Australian privacy watchdogs last year launched a joint probe of their own.<\/p>\n

“Just because something is ‘online’ does not mean it is fair game<\/a> to be app<\/a>ropriated by others in any which way they want to\u2014neither morally nor legally,” said Alan Dahi, a data protection lawyer at Austrian privacy group Noyb.<\/p>\n

Clearview came to public prominence in a January 2020 New York Times report that detailed how it was already working with law enforcement, including the US FBI and Department of Homeland Security.<\/p>\n

On its website, it boasts the “largest known database of 3+ billion facial images sourced from public-only web sources, including news<\/a> media, mugshot websites, public social media, and many other open sources”.<\/p>\n

Founder Hoan Ton-That acknowledged to the NYT at the time that Clearview was breaching the terms of service of Facebook and other social media sites by gathering users’ photos.<\/p>\n

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (Google) and LinkedIn (Microsoft) have all protested against Clearview’s practices.<\/p>\n

And last year, tech firms including Microsoft and Amazon suspended sales of facial recognition software to police forces when confronted with 2020’s Black Lives Matter movement.<\/p>\n

Amazon last week extended the original one-year moratorium “until further notice”.<\/p>\n

But “tools for conducting facial recognition are widely available” even outside the big tech companies, according to journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril, who complied a report on the technology for advocacy group AlgorithmWatch last year that found at least 10 European police forces using it.\n <\/p>\n\n

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Canada probe concludes Clearview AI breached privacy laws\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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\n \u00a9 2021 AFP<\/p>\n

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Citation<\/strong>:
\n EU privacy groups set sights on facial recognition firm (2021, May 27)
\n retrieved 27 May 2021
\n from https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2021-05-eu-privacy-groups-sights-facial.html<\/p>\n

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