Australia regulator demands face-scanning firm delete photos

Clearview has boasted it has a much larger collection of 'more than 10 billion facial images, the largest known database of its kind' and that all are publicly accessible and legally obtained from online news sources, mugshot websites and social media. — Business vector created by gstudioimagen - www.freepik.com

An Australian privacy authority has ordered facial recognition company Clearview AI to stop scanning the faces of Australians and destroy the images and related data it has already collected.

It's the latest challenge for the New York startup that has angered privacy advocates around the world over its practice of "scraping” photos from social media to identify people wanted by police and other government agencies.