Journalism as (Temporary?) Catalyst for Police Governance Reform Regarding Use of Facial Recognition Technologies: Analysis of the Clearview AI Scandal in Canada

In January 2020, the New York Times published an article about Clearview AI, an American company whose facial recognition technology utilized a database of billions of images scraped from the internet, that had managed to amass over 600 police services as clients in the United States, without any public scrutiny. This initial story was picked up by journalists worldwide who began asking their local police if they were also using this technology, with news media attention being most intense in Canada, which was eventually revealed to be the second largest market for the product outside the US. In this chapter, we trace the broad contours of legacy news media coverage of the controversy across Canada, using a thematic content analysis to identify the main narrative features that journalists employed in the initial three months after the story broke.

The Clearview AI revelations presented an opportunity for Canadian journalists to lean into their role as watchdogs exposing flaws in police oversight that led to what was cast as a national, collective privacy rights violation. While the work of journalists covering this cyber-event contributed to valuable techno-criticism, the complex media-police relationship also tempered that criticism, making room for the legitimation of police use of other now comparatively less controversial forms of facial recognition technologies.