Australia’s privacy commissioner has ordered facial recognition company Clearview AI to stop scanning the faces of Australians.

Clearview AI has outraged privacy advocates around the world with its practice of ‘scraping’ photos from social media to help police and other agencies identify people.

Clearview AI boasts its collection of “more than 10 billion facial images… [is] the largest known database of its kind”. 

Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk says the company breaches Australians’ privacy when it pulls their personal data and discloses it through facial recognition.

“The covert collection of this kind of sensitive information is unreasonably intrusive and unfair,” Ms Falk said in a written statement.

“It carries significant risk of harm to individuals, including vulnerable groups such as children and victims of crime.”

The Australian regulator has ordered the company “to cease collecting facial images and biometric templates from individuals in Australia, and to destroy existing images and templates collected from Australia”. 

Those templates include digital and mathematical representations derived from images that can be matched against a database.

Clearview says it will appeal the decision. 

The company has questioned whether the regulator has jurisdiction, as Clearview claims not to do any business in Australia.

Clearview AI used to provide its software to some Australian police forces, including the federal police, but this stopped when the regulator began its investigation.