Clearview vs. Canada
How Canada's privacy commissioners got it so very wrong and will continue to wrongly identify people
I want to say a few things about the terrible decision of the Canadian privacy commissioners to bar Clearview, the world’s preeminent facial recognition company. It’s unclear if these meddlesome nitwits have that authority but the company has given up on Canada and that makes me furious.
I must confess I took this ban rather personally. Canada was a sort of adopted home for me growing up. I learned French as a child and now speak it, along with German and Spanish, fluently. I summered in Prince Edward Island often — where else would I find people who loved my family’s red hair? Thank you, Anne of Green Gables! — and I vacationed often in Quebec. I’d take the old Chinatown bus up to Toronto in my misspent teenage years. Indeed Canada was a sort of refuge from the world—one I badly needed.
American intelligence officers with vacation homes in Canada stayed in the spare bedroom of my childhood home. One even begged I call them “Aunt Mildred". Really.
Naturally I spent my thirtieth birthday in Toronto and I learned that I was to be a father of a little girl in a Canadian town when my then wife and I opened a gender reveal card together. No, I am not your typical American. I have been to every Canadian province save Nunavut. At one point, when looking at enrolling in that great Canadian university McGill I even considered becoming a Canadian citizen. (I speak fluent French and my great grandmother as well as possinbly my grandmother were Canadians.)
Like the recent bans of Clearview in Los Angeles (where I spent my twenties) and Boston (where I spent my youth), these facial recognition bans are starting to have an emotional effect. The people I love still live in these communities and invest or build as I may I can’t protect them and it sucks being powerless.
To be sure I take some solace in that in virtual every place there is a ban on facial recognition there are brave law enforcement officers that work around it, the less said of that the better.
But there’s no dispute that the facial recognition company has been a game changer in Canada and everywhere else it’s been used. We must always put the victims first. So here’s the obligatory New York Times mention.
“Dozens of law enforcement agencies and organizations across Canada used the app, according to the commissioners, including the national Royal Canadian Mounted Police. One Canadian law enforcement officer told The Times last year that it was “the biggest breakthrough in the last decade” for identifying young victims of sexual abuse.
And yet here we have the propaganda.
Incredibly Daniel Therrien says that Clearview puts all of society in “continually in a police lineup.”
In fact Clearview eliminates the bias of human beings when it comes to things like the police line up. Machines are better at detecting people than police relying on their own bias and human error.
Activist Yuan Stevens says she’s afraid of discrimination because she’s “nonwhite” — as if Clearview, designed by nonwhite and white people, would ever discriminate on the basis of race.
Stevens is right to worry about Canada’s terrible history of discrimination but Canada’s problem isn’t too much technology but rather too little.
Canada has a long and troubling history of scapegoating ethnic minorities. Its most famous case — that of Guy Paul Morin, a Canadian man who was wrongly accused of and convicted of the October 1984 rape and murder of his nine-year-old neighbor, Christine Jessop. His ordeal consumed a decade of his life and made a mockery of the Canadian justice system.
Morin was exonerated in 1995 and he was paid millions in compensation. He served 18 months in prison.
Morin reflected on his ordeal in January 18, 1993:
According to Morin and his lawyers, part of the Crown’s case rested on the assessment of the accused man’s character. “In the notebooks of one of the officers, I’m a weird type guy,” Morin said. “Why? Because I keep some bees, because I do some gardening, because I enjoy camping and fishing. Big deal. Once the police believe they’ve focused on the right suspect, they put their blindfolds on. Other suspects are ruled out.”
Morin was persecuted because he was weird and schizophrenic. How often does this happen? Way too often.
That case was solved, thanks to a collaboration with a private genetics technology laboratory, which relies on the latest in technology to solve murders and rapes.
You can watch it here.
Toronto Police finally gave closure to the family of both the victim and the wrongly accused, who was himself victimized. But eventually genetic genealogy freed him and gave him back his reputation when it found the real killer.
While [Morin] was in custody, [his sister] Kowalski said she often flew from Vancouver to Toronto, then travelled to Kingston on weekends to visit him in prison. She said he always chose to remain with the general prison population, refusing protective custody or segregation.
Kowalski said she barely slept Thursday night, feeling both shock and happiness at the day's news.
"Finally, after all these years, even though we knew he had always been innocent, and also the fact that he was exonerated. It never really cleared him, until the real killer has been caught."
…
Morin "wouldn't hurt a fly, that's why it was so shocking to us that they would pick on someone nice like him — just because they didn't like his face," she said.
Genetics helped law enforcement identify the real killer of young miss Jessop, Calvin Hoover. Hoover took his life in 2015.
Morin and his sister were ecstatic to have it known to the world that Morin was innocent but their father died before he, too, could see it. He never lived to see his son innocent at last.
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Fortunately the adults in corporate America care about facial recognition and its role.
He’s right, of course.