Surveillance
TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints’
A change to TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy on Wednesday introduced a new section that says the social video app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from its users’ content. This includes things like “faceprints and voiceprints,” the policy explained. Reached for comment, TikTok could not confirm what product developments…
Read More »RCMP’s use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology violated Privacy Act, investigation concludes
GATINEAU, QC, June 10, 2021 – The RCMP’s use of facial recognition technology (FRT) to conduct hundreds of searches of a database compiled illegally by a commercial enterprise is a violation of the Privacy Act, an investigation has found. In a Special Report to Parliament, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner…
Read More »Weak privacy, weak procurement: The state of facial recognition in Canada
About the Authors Yuan Stevens Policy Lead on Technology, Cybersecurity and Democracy, Ryerson Leadership Lab and Cybersecure Policy Exchange at Ryerson University Yuan (“You-anne”) Stevens is a legal and policy expert focused on cybersecurity, privacy, and human rights. She brings years of international experience to her role at Ryerson University…
Read More »Google and the Age of Privacy Theater
GOOGLE GOT SOME good press a few weeks ago when it announced in a blog post that it would be moving forward with its plans to remove third-party cookies from the Chrome browser. The move had been announced early last year as part of the company’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, but now Google has…
Read More »Supreme Court rejects Facebook’s appeal to scale back $15B class action lawsuit
A hot potato: Facebook broadly discloses the fact that it tracks people around the web even if they don’t have accounts, by virtue of social plugins, Facebook-linked logins, Facebook Analytics, as well as ad measurement tools on some websites. However, its attempts to scale back a $15 billion class action lawsuit…
Read More »Groups Call for Ethical Guidelines on Location-Tracking Tech
As smartphone apps track our every move, a group of technologists in the US and UK this week offered guidelines for the ethical uses of location data. Leaders of the American Geographical Society and Britain’s mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, want companies to commit to 10 principles, including minimizing data…
Read More »Comments on the Clearview AI joint Report of Findings
On February 3, 2021, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec (CAI), the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (OIPC BC), and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta (AB OIPC, and together with the BC OIPC, the CAI and the OPC, the Regulators), published…
Read More »Clearview AI’s unlawful practices represented mass surveillance of Canadians, commissioners say
February 3, 2021 – Technology company Clearview AI’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the Internet represented mass surveillance and was a clear violation of the privacy rights of Canadians, an investigation has found. The joint investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Commission…
Read More »Cadillac Fairview collected 5 million shoppers’ images
October 29, 2020 – Cadillac Fairview – one of North America’s largest commercial real estate companies – embedded cameras inside their digital information kiosks at 12 shopping malls across Canada and used facial recognition technology without their customers’ knowledge or consent, an investigation by the federal, Alberta and BC Privacy Commissioners…
Read More »CJEU throws wrinkle into EU-UK adequacy talks
The Court of Justice of the European Union continues to make things interesting in the data protection world. First came the court’s “Schrems II” decision last July, and this week, the CJEU issued a ruling that could spring a leak and potentially sink adequacy negotiations between the U.K. and EU.…
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Schrems II Judgment Day
The Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU“) issued its judgment today in …
