9 million faces exposed in ClarityCheck leak. How many of the photos were Canadian is unknown

Advertisement 1 This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Breadcrumb Trail Links HomeNewsTech 9 million faces exposed in ClarityCheck leak. How many of the photos were Canadian is unknown ClarityCheck lets a stranger upload your photo and get back your name. A University of Ottawa privacy chair says Canadians have almost no way to get one removed Author of the article: By Mason Kossak Published Aug 26, 2026 Last updated 3 hours ago 5 minute read Join the conversation Group of men and women in a collage. PHOTO BY SIPHOTOGRAPHY /Getty Images/iStockphoto Article content A company that sells the ability to identify a stranger from a photograph left more than nine million files unsecured online, a researcher found. Article content ClarityCheck sells reverse image searches. A user uploads a photo and the site returns names, social profiles and where else the image appears online. Canadian visitors are quoted $1.69 for a seven-day trial and $38.99 every 28 days after that. Article content Article content Article content The company also sells lookups on phone numbers, email addresses, vehicle identification numbers, names and businesses. Its homepage says it can “identify unknown callers, verify online contacts, check photos, and decode vehicles using publicly available data from trusted sources.” Article content NP Posted Get a dash of perspective along with the trending news of the day in a very readable format. Sign Up By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Article content Cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler found 9,042,977 image files in unsecured cloud storage belonging to the company, in folders labelled faces and profiles. The images included adults, teenagers and children, he wrote in a report published by ExpressVPN. Article content The site is offered in more than 20 languages and prices its trial separately for the United States, Britain, the European Union, Australia and Canada. How many of the images were Canadian is unknown. Article content The people in those folders are not the customers. They are the people being looked up. ClarityCheck’s image search page says the subject of a search will never be notified, and the company will pull a phone number or an email address from its results on request. It has no equivalent for a photograph. Article content “If you’re trying to find out who a person is,…