B.C. Court of Appeal upholds order against Clearview AI over facial scraping
The Court of Appeal for British Columbia has dismissed an appeal by Clearview AI Inc. and upheld a finding by the province's information and privacy commissioner that the facial recognition company broke B.C.'s Personal Information Protection Act. The decision, Clearview AI Inc. v. British Columbia (Information and Privacy Commissioner), 2026 BCCA 67, was released on Feb. 18.
The ruling matters because it confirms that a foreign company with no remaining customers in the province can still be bound by provincial privacy law when it scrapes the personal information of people who live there. It also backs the commissioner's view that images posted on social media are not free for the taking simply because they are publicly visible.
Background
Clearview, a U.S. company, sells facial recognition software mainly to police and other government agencies. Its tool collects facial images from publicly accessible websites around the world, including social media, and stores them with related data on its servers.
Canadian privacy commissioners began a joint investigation in early 2020, and Clearview withdrew from the Canadian market while it was under way. In December 2021, the B.C. commissioner found several contraventions of the provincial law and ordered Clearview to use its best efforts to stop collecting, using and disclosing images and biometric facial arrays of people in B.C., and to delete the data it held. Clearview sought judicial review, which was dismissed, and then appealed, according to a summary by law firm Deeth Williams Wall.
What the court decided
- Jurisdiction: The provincial law applies. Even though Clearview stopped marketing to B.C. organizations, its ongoing scraping of data about people worldwide, including British Columbians, gives it a sufficient connection to the province.
- Consent: The commissioner reasonably concluded that the law's exemption for publicly available information did not apply, and that Clearview's purposes were not reasonable, so it could not rely on implied consent.
- Remedy: The commissioner's order was reasonable and enforceable.
Why it matters
The decision strengthens the hand of Canadian regulators dealing with companies that build products by scraping the open web, including developers of AI models. It signals that a lack of physical presence or customers in Canada is not, on its own, a defence, and that "publicly available" has a narrow meaning in Canadian privacy law.
Organizations that collect images or other personal data from websites and social platforms should check whether that collection fits within the narrow statutory definitions of publicly available information, rather than assuming anything visible online can be used.
