A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Capitol Hill riots and the role facial recognition technology played in identifying perpetrators.
You see, the FBI collected more than 100,000 digital images from the January 6 insurrection, and they've played a vital part in the more than 70 arrests that have since taken place.
That's because local police departments and citizen sleuths have been able use advanced AI to compare those pictures with vast banks of photos pilfered from the internet.
For example, Larry Brock, who stormed the Capitol with a flak jacket, helmet, and zip-tie handcuffs, was identified because his photo turned up on an obscure website called Alumnius.net.
One of the most prominent facial recognition companies being deployed in this capacity has been Clearview AI.
Clearview is a widely known name in the facial recognition industry, and it helped the Miami police force identify 13 potential rioters from more than 1,000 miles away.
But its practices are suspect.
Clearview uses a database of billions of photographs that it's scraped from public social media pages without the knowledge or consent of the users.
That means if your Facebook or Instagram page isn't privately locked, they've probably scooped up your photos.
"We have over 3 billion photos that we indexed from the public internet, like Google for faces," CEO Hoan Ton-That bragged to IEEE Spectrum. "Use our system, and in about a second it might point to someone's Instagram page."
It also provides access to a smartphone app that allows clients to upload a photo of an unknown person and instantly receive a set of matching photos.
Well, as it turns out, not everyone is cool with that.
And yesterday, Canadian authorities ruled that Clearview's technology is, in fact, illegal.
A joint investigation of privacy authorities led by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada determined that the "scraping of billions of images of people from across the internet represented mass surveillance" and infringes on the privacy rights of Canadians.