A silent but significant ruling made in a courtroom in Alberta in May 2025 is probably going to have repercussions that extend well beyond the boundaries of the province and the specific business that brought it about. Parts of Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act, or PIPA, were declared unconstitutional by the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta on the grounds that they attempted to do too much, too much, rather than protecting privacy.
Clearview AI, a U.S.-based company whose business strategy relies on extracting billions of photos from the public internet and transforming them into a searchable facial recognition database for law enforcement, filed the challenge. The term Clearview has come to represent the uncomfortable union of artificial intelligence and surveillance, and the company is no stranger to controversy.
| Key Context | Details |
|---|---|
| Court | Court of King’s Bench of Alberta |
| Decision date | May 2025 |
| Law affected | Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) |
| Core issue | Whether consent rules for publicly available online data violate Charter rights |
| Company at centre | Clearview AI |
| Charter provision | Section 2(b) – Freedom of expression |
| Outcome | Parts of PIPA regulation struck as unconstitutionally overbroad |
Already, Canadian privacy commissioners had adopted a strong position. The corporation was forced to cease operations and remove biometric data in multiple jurisdictions, including Alberta, after federal and provincial officials found in 2020 that Clearview had gathered and utilized personal information without consent. Claiming that Alberta lacked jurisdiction over a foreign corporation and that a large portion of the data was from publicly available sources, Clearview declined.
On jurisdiction, the Court couldn’t agree. Justice Feasby pointed out that servers are not the deciding element. Clearview established a genuine and significant link with the province by marketing its services to Alberta police and handling Albertan data. That discovery alone confirmed that, despite the seeming frictionlessness of data transfers, boundaries still matter in digital governance.
The decision got trickier when it came to how it handled “publicly available” data. Unless an exception applies, PIPA requires organizations to get consent before collecting and using personal data. Information found in publications—which are described by laws as sources like magazines, books, or newspapers—that contain the term “including, but not limited to” is one such exemption.
According to Clearview, social media and other internet platforms should logically incorporate this language. In contrast, the Alberta Privacy Commissioner interpreted the exclusion narrowly, in line with privacy law’s quasi-constitutional character. The Court confirmed that social media posts do not automatically qualify as publicly available just because anybody can view them, upholding that limited interpretation.
Then the matter of the Charter arose. According to Clearview, limiting its capacity to scrape public websites violated its right to free speech as guaranteed by Section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Part of that reasoning was adopted by the Court, which surprised some. Even for business interests, gathering and sharing information might be considered expressive action, according to Justice Feasby.
That acknowledgement was a little but significant turning point. While acknowledging that modern expression increasingly occurs through robots acting on human instructions, the Court did not support widespread surveillance. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as data aggregators or search engines, can engage in expression without sounding like human speech.
The Court further underlined that the rights guaranteed by the Charter are not unqualified. The judge concluded that the reasonable objective of granting Albertans control over their personal information is rationally linked to PIPA’s permission requirements. In this way, the fundamental goal of the statute withstood examination.
PIPA’s overreaching regulation was where it faltered. The rule ran the risk of capturing benign actions, like search engines indexing websites to increase access to information, by concentrating solely on the source of information rather than the purpose for which it was utilized. The Court came to the conclusion that this overbreadth was unjustified.
The Court removed a particular clause from the regulation, “including, but not limited to magazines, books, and newspapers,” in order to address the issue. Eliminating those phrases makes it possible to define “publication” more broadly as material that is purposefully made available to the public rather than being limited to conventional media formats. The ramifications are significant, but the effect is surgical rather than sweeping.
Clearview does not get a pass because of this change. The Court proceeded to evaluate whether Clearview’s actions complied with the distinct PIPA requirement that personal data be used exclusively for reasons that a reasonable person would find acceptable. Clearview was decisively defeated on that front.
Facilitating biometric surveillance as a commercial service does not fulfill that requirement, as Justice Feasby concurred with the Commissioner. Police may find the tool handy, but Albertans’ realistic expectations are more important. The Court distinguished clearly between technology that facilitate mass identification and tracking and those that improve universal access to information.
Perhaps the ruling’s most lasting impact will be that distinction. It implies that discussions regarding AI and privacy in the future will focus more on how effectively data can be combined, analyzed, and weaponized than on whether or not it is public.
The message is both positive and warning for policymakers. Privacy laws need to be clear, particularly when they relate to the liberties outlined in the Charter. Even when their objective is broadly accepted, definitions that are too strict run the danger of collapsing under constitutional assessment.
The ruling does not provide a simple solution for businesses involved in the AI industry. Just because servers are located elsewhere does not mean that jurisdiction will vanish, and “public” data is not a moral blank slate. Three key factors continue to be purpose, proportionality, and public trust.
The Alberta decision explains the landscape but does not end Canada’s larger battle with AI spying. Consent is still relevant. Reasonableness is still important. And people will be debating constitutional rights more and more, as will the mechanisms they create and implement.
What happens is a recalibration rather than a win for monitoring or a loss for privacy. Cases that don’t cleanly fit into previous classifications are forcing the law to change, sentence by clause, phrase by phrase, much like the technology it now governs.
