ONE HAS TO ADMIRE JUSTIN TRUDEAU’S RESOLVE IN REFUSING TO BE BOUND BY THE CONVENTIONS THAT HAVE CONSTRAINED HIS PREDECESSORS. THERE IS EVERY PROSPECT THE PM IS ON THE BRINK OF AN INGLORIOUS HAT-TRICK.
This is the latest in a series of articles on Big Tech’s damage to democracy, public safety and consumers.
The wisdom of donning a face mask is not only about COVID-19 prevention. It is the only way to defend against the contagion of facial recognition surveillance, which is being deployed by advertisers, governments, police, criminals and even doorbells.
Billions of cameras surveil citizens in China, Russia and other tyrannical states and are attached to massive facial databases that can identify accused, convicted or “suspicious” citizens. This is also becoming pervasive in democracies. There is now one surveillance camera for every four people in the United States.
Facial biometric technology is benign when used as a verification tool to unlock phones or computers. But the technology can facilitate a Big Brother society, as China has demonstrated.
Such concerns have led big tech companies to back away from its usage and development, and even call for regulation. Recently, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft paused or limited law enforcement’s access to their own facial recognition programs. This follows incidents such as the false arrest in Michigan of an African-american man who was identified by a faulty facial recognition system. The police chief later admitted that the software had a 96-per-cent inaccuracy rate.
IBM sent a letter to members of Congress to explain its stance. Arvind Krishna, its CEO, said the company was no longer making general-purpose facial recognition and analysis software due to concerns about police usage. IBM “firmly opposes” the use of facial recognition “for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms,” he wrote.
In forging much-needed regulations, consent should be a requirement. Without it, biometrics will go crazy. Companies will be tracking customer patterns in stores and selling that data to others, and facial ID will allow police or anyone else to unlock anyone’s phone by simply holding an individual’s device up to his or her face.
There are many privacy and human rights issues involved here, which is why internet activists are calling for the suspension of the use of facial recognition software by governments and corporations. There is pending legislation in the U.S. Congress, as well as some states, to limit this and other biometric technologies. As for Canada, don’t hold your breath.
David Macnaughton, Canada’s former ambassador to the U.S. and a personal friend of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s, quit government to run the Canadian operation of the highly secretive Palantir Technologies, which is owned by Peter Thiel, a prominent supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump. He will be able to tap his Liberal network and peddle this technology to governments, agencies and police forces throughout Canada.
Yet the proliferation of this tech should not be allowed to happen until regulations are put in place — regulations that suit the public interest, not Silicon Valley’s.
Some social media sites allow individuals to snoop on one another with facial recognition tools. A decade ago, Facebook began offering a facial recognition-based photo tagging option, which scans photos that users post to the platform to find their “friends,” or other people they could tag and follow.
But the company failed to get users’ permission in 2010 and, this year, Facebook agreed to pay US$550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in Illinois (which has a strict Biometric Information Privacy Act) over privacy violations.
Despite the lingering litigation, Facebook did not tighten controls and only in 2019 did it begin to require users to opt in to the service. Similar cases are underway in Europe to limit this type of software, which has been the subject of privacy and harassment complaints.
Mass surveillance is already underway. A 2016 study estimated that more than half of Americans were in a facial recognition database of some kind. There are also companies that mine these databases, along with the web and social media, on behalf of law enforcement agencies.
All of this is why, until rules are put in place, it’s a good idea — whether you are heading out to the mall, a “COVID spreader event” or a Black Lives Matter protest — to continue to don a mask.