Clearview AI challenges B.C. privacy watchdog order

> The point being... _they then know where it's from_, that's the metadata. If they know the trade show, then they know where and when it was, whether it was in Canada and whether they need to delete it.

In most cases they probably only know the URL, and it's far from trivial (or even possible in a general case) to mechanically derive if photo was taken in Canada from that.

Personally I hope they're forced to overshoot and delete far more than necessary to ensure compliance (e.g. only keep photos they can positively determine were taken outside of Canada).

They don't, they just know the original URL. IIRC, they also scrape news websites and it's impossible to automatically and correctly detect the location of a person.

Even if it's from a social network, you still can't be sure. Especially, if a photo have multiple persons.

You might have misunderstood tablespoon's remark:

"if the police know where the matched photo is from"

The "matched photo" is the right argument in the function

  match(photo_scraped_by_clearview, photo_of_interest)

The matched photo is some piece of evidence the police already have from some investigation, e.g. surveillance camera or whatever. They know exactly where they got it. This is matched against the Clearview AI database. So then that match attaches information to the Clearview AI photo. They may be able to figure out where that was taken, since it is narrowed down.

> A government that goes after the little guys and gives big cos a pass is illegitimate.

A government that governs without consent of the governed is illegitimate. A government that governs inconsistently is not necessarily illegitimate. The legitimacy of a government is not determined by any particular small-large business axis. Viewing the world through that axis is not helpful in this case.

And while we're at it, just because your government is unfair doesn't make it illegitimate. There are plenty of state governments[1] that were, and are incredibly unfair in their enforcement of their laws, but when they aren't actively stealing elections, I wouldn't call them illegitimate.

[1] For a crystal-clear example, the south under Jim Crow. Unfair laws, unfair enforcement of laws, but I'd be hard-pressed to argue that many of those governments did not have the consent of most of who they governed.

If I run a liquor store in Florida, and a Saudi tourist visits it and buys a bottle of wine, that's not my problem. Saudi Arabia can't do anything to me, regardless of how many of their drug laws I'm breaking.

If I start advertising my store in Saudi Arabia, or move my money into a Saudi bank, or visit their kingdom, then I'll have a problem. Because it can do something to me. It can tell my business partners to cut me off, or seize my money, or, in the latter case, arrest me as a drug kingpin.

Sort of. Originally, it was just hackers making things on the internet. Now, it's the most popular way to make money in the world. So if there's a way to make money doing something reprehensible on the internet, someone reprehensible will find it and do it.

As much as I dislike legal overreach in international matters, I agree: the pictures of Canadian individuals are likely to have been taken in Canada, or to come from Canadian sources or websites. The fact that they may have been shared with a US company (ex: Facebook, LinkedIn) is irrelevant: copyright etc. does not cease to exist when crossing a digital border. Some countries also have extra protections on top of copyright, like use right, certain rights you can't sign away, etc.

Even worse: by being able to correlate that to Canadian individuals (using metadata or facial metrics, etc), the company can't pretend they don't know who these pictures are from, or where they come from: they know damn well, which makes the court requests limited scope even more acceptable.

Also, claiming to be ignorant of Canadian law may not be a good excuse. They should have known, if only to start doing business there.

Let's construct an equivalent: if in ISIS or Afghan territory, a terrorist group had scraped pictures of people living in the EU or US, and known by them to be "enemies of the caliphate" or something equivalent and that's it's totally A-OK within their legal system to publish that on a website say to call for their murder (I must confess my ignorance on these matters but you get the idea), we'd all say "no it's not". This is just the same. What's legal for us to do domestically with domestic pictures of citizens may not be legal to do somewhere else, and importing the pictures to do it domestically doesn't magically make it legal.

There's a bit of a hitch, as a photo can be legally taken, and legally transferred to a non-Canadian entity, at which point things get problematic. Canadian copyright and privacy rules don't usually apply to foreign entities.

That's not really how it works. A judgment is kind of a universal thing. It is a right to the the value of the judgment and you can assert it in any number of ways. If you have a judgment against a foreign company, and that company temporarily has some assets in a bank in the country that issued the judgment, you can get a court order to have them seized. You can also go to other countries and enforce that judgment. If I sue you in the UK and win, but I can't adequately enforce the judgment in the UK because all of your assets are in another country, I can generally go to that other country and ask a court there to enforce the judgment. One of the main things that court will look into is whether the court that issued the judgment was acting properly under international law in the first place.

A country that issues a judgment beyond the scope of its jurisdiction under international law is violating international law. There's no international police to come get you, but you're not operating by the rules of the road and foreign countries will start to look at judgments originating in your country with suspicion. If you aggressively enforce illegally extraterritorial judgments, such as by seizing the assets of foreign actors that are just passing through your company, you might even get into tit-for-tats with other countries.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction is not totally illegal, but there are limits and this would seem to be outside of those.

You're talking about extending Canadian copyright rules internationally, which isn't how copyright works. Copyright varies a lot.

You're mixing up personal jurisdiction with legislative jurisdiction. There is a body of customary international law that concerns the appropriate scope for extraterritorial legislative jurisdiction. This is separate from personal jurisdiction, which is in some ways easier to establish. In the US, for example, you can get personal jurisdiction over any natural person, and sue them for any way they wronged you anywhere in the world, merely by serving them with process while they are physically present in the US. But if you sue someone in Alabama for something they did in France, the Alabama court is going to apply French law in most cases. (in most countries, there is also something like the common law doctrine of forum non conveniens that allows courts to dismiss cases that are better heard by a court elsewhere)

And it's simply not the case that foreign judgments are generally unenforceable. See the discussion here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforcement_of_foreign_judgmen... . No treaty is necessary, though it certainly helps the person seeking enforcement if there is one.

You're right in that international law isn't real in the same way that national laws are. But countries do consider international law in determining whether to give effect to another country's actions. If EU member states started seizing assets of businesses that it applied the GDPR to in violation of international laws, other countries would take that as a hostile action and possibly stop recognizing EU member state judgments, for example, as presumptively valid. And they can take retaliatory actions against European companies.

Customary international law is best thought of as widely accepted norms of fairness between sovereign states. There is no international police to come get you when you don't play nice, but staying within the dictates of international law generally protects you from accusations of unfair play and the consequences that can bring.

And yeah, the US maybe does violate international law in the specifics of its sanctions policies, though they are usually carefully crafted to only apply to people who somehow participate in the US financial/payments system. It's very possible that one day the US will pay the price for this overreach/maximalism when countries eagerly jump ship to an alternative international financial system, should a viable one emerge. But for now, the US is the only real game in town. The strong take what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

TIL intellectual property theft is a natural right.