Australia’s privacy watchdog will not probe facial recognition company Clearview AI again despite remaining questions over whether it failed to comply with orders issued to it following breaches of the Privacy Act.
Clearview AI was ordered by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to stop non-consensually harvesting images of people in Australia and delete images scraped from Australia in October 2021.
It followed an investigation that found the company had breached the Privacy Act by scraping biometric information, particularly during an Australian Federal Police trial of the facial recognition technology between 2019 and 2020.
But questions around Clearview’s compliance with the order were raised earlier this year, when the company’s founder Hoan Ton-That claimed in an interview with MLex that it is impossible to tell if “an Australian citizen or resident” is in any of the images it holds.
In a statement issued a year after Clearview AI abandoned its appeal of the OAIC determination, Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind said she is “not satisfied that further action is warranted in the particular case of Clearview AI”.
Ms Kind, who began as Privacy Commissioner at the end of February, said “extensive consideration” had been given to the “question of whether the OAIC should invest further resources in scrutinising the actions of Clearview AI”.
She put this down to the company having already been “investigated by the OAIC and which has found itself the subject of regulatory investigations in at least three jurisdictions around the world as well as a class action in the United States”.
“Considering all the relevant factors, I am not satisfied that further action is warranted in the particular case of Clearview AI at this time,” Ms Kind said in a statement on Wednesday.
Instead, the regulator reiterated that the “determination against Clearview AI still stands” and the unlawful data scraping it engaged in is “troubling and are increasingly common due to the drive towards the development of generative AI models”.
Earlier this year, Ms Kind told a Senate Estimates hearing that the question of Clearview AI’s compliance “is not easily answered” as they are based outside of Australia.
“Clearview AI aren’t present here in the jurisdiction, and understanding whether or not they’ve complied with orders is a technical matter,” Ms Kind said told Senate Estimates.
In August 2023, the OAIC issued a joint statement with 11 other data protection and privacy regulators on the need to address data scraping, stressing the obligations of social media platforms and publicly accessible sites to protect personal information.
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