Australia regulator demands face-scanning firm delete photos

An Australian privacy authority has ordered facial recognition company Clearview AI to stop scanning the faces of Australians and destroy the images and related data it has already collected. Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk said Wednesday that the company breached Australians’ privacy by pulling their personal data from the web and disclosing it through its facial recognition tool. “It carries significant risk of harm to individuals, including vulnerable groups such as children and victims of crime.” Falk’s office and its British counterpart jointly opened an investigation into Clearview last year. The Australian regulator said it is ordering the company “to cease collecting facial images and biometric templates from individuals in Australia, and to destroy existing images and templates collected from Australia.” In this case, biometric templates are digital or mathematical representations derived from images that can be matched against a database. Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That, describing himself as a dual citizen of the U.S. and Australia, where he grew up, said in an emailed statement he was disheartened that the Australian regulator misinterpreted his technology’s value in helping law enforcement solve “heinous crimes.” The company has largely defied demands by bigger tech companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that it stop collecting their users’ images.