Durham Regional Police have confirmed “several” of their investigative units used the controversial Clearview AI facial recognition technology, becoming the fourth Greater Toronto Area police service to test the potentially illegal app.

An internal canvass of investigative units initiated by Chief Paul Martin confirmed multiple investigative units have used the tool on “a trial basis,” police spokesperson Dave Selby said Thursday. Asked which units used the tool, Selby said he didn’t have further information.

Investigators were using the app “to see if there was any value in terms of local investigations,” he said.

“The Chief ordered that the use of such technology be stopped immediately until the matter is reviewed and further direction is received from the privacy commissioner,” Selby said.

Police forces in Toronto, Peel Region and Halton Region have confirmed they used the app, which is made by U.S.-based startup Clearview AI and allows police investigators to search a database the company claims contains three billion images — all scraped from the open web, including social media sites.

All police services have halted their use of the tool, pending further direction by Ontario’s privacy commissioner.

The RCMP and Ontario Provincial Police will not say whether they have used Clearview AI.

Privacy commissioners in Ontario and British Columbia have raised urgent concerns about the tool, calling into question whether the app follows Canadian privacy legislation.

Michael McEvoy, British Columbia’s privacy commissioner, said Canadian privacy regulators are considering whether Clearview’s tool runs afoul of laws protecting Canadians against businesses collecting personal information — including photos posted online — without their explicit consent.

Ontario privacy commissioner Brian Beamish instructed any police force using the tool to “stop this practice immediately and contact my office.”

Beamish has said he questions whether there are any circumstances in which using Clearview AI would be acceptable.

“The indiscriminate scraping of the internet to collect images of people’s faces for law enforcement purposes has significant privacy implications for all Ontarians,” Beamish said in a statement last week. “We have made it clear in the past that my office should be consulted before this type of technology is used.”

It is not clear whether the use of Clearview AI has resulted in any arrests. Peel police have said the tool wasn’t used on any active investigations, while further details about how other forces used the app are not yet known.

A Toronto police spokesperson said last week that the force has also requested that the Crown Attorneys Office participate in the ongoing review of Clearview AI technology.

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John Struthers, president of the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, said at this stage he doesn’t believe the tool could be used as “a pure justification” for an arrest — in part because no one would want to be testifying in court about their use of the technology.

“I suspect that this is being used, at least at this early stage, as sort of a secret informational tool, which is only going to be used to point police in a particular direction or to complete an investigation on a particular individual. It would not be admissible in court at this point — it would be highly doubtful,” Struthers said.

With files from Kate Allen