Watchdogs seek limits on police, facial recognition
Laws should specify when use is appropriate
OTTAWA • Canada's privacy commissioners called Monday for clear laws putting in place limits on police use of facial recognition technology.
Federal Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien told MPS the new law is needed “urgently.” The law should explicitly specify for what purposes police can use facial recognition and ban other uses, he said during an appearance at the House of Commons ethics committee.
“Authorized purposes should be compelling and proportionate to the very high risks of the technology,” he said.
Therrien and his provincial and territorial counterparts said in a joint statement Monday that facial recognition is governed by a patchwork of laws that, for the most part, “do not specifically address different uses or risks posed by the technology.”
They said “no-go” zones should include “a prohibition on any use of facial recognition that can result in mass surveillance.”
Therrien said he's not in favour of a complete ban on the use of facial recognition by law enforcement, and said there are legitimate uses of the technology, such as help in finding missing children or identifying people of concern at borders. He said it should be limited to “serious crime.”
“I'm not sure that facial recognition should be used for common theft, for instance, given the risks … for privacy and other democratic rights,” he said.
Last year, his office found the RCMP'S use of facial recognition that relied on a database from a private company, Clearview AI, violated the Privacy Act.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner said Clearview AI violated Canada's private-sector privacy laws by illegally amassing a database of more than three billion images without user consent and then allowing customers, including the RCMP, to match photos against the database. The company no longer offers its services in Canada.
Therrien said the RCMP has since stated it's not using facial recognition for mass surveillance, and he has no reason to doubt that statement.
But that doesn't mean the national police force isn't using facial recognition at all, he noted, citing what he said was unclear testimony from the RCMP at the committee last week.
The definition the RCMP representative gave about the circumstances of the agency's use of facial recognition was “ambiguous,” Therrien said.
“That's why we are sending out the document today.”
On Thursday, the RCMP'S acting deputy commissioner of specialized policing services, Paul Boudreau, told the committee that “if you look at the technologies such as Clearview AI, the RCMP is not using any new or advanced facial recognition technologies.”
Boudreau said the RCMP works with partners that use facial recognition, such as Project Arachnid, which detects child sexual abuse materials. He said the RCMP was not using the technology for active surveillance of mass protests.
“The RCMP inherently has used facial recognition as part of our processes in the past. You can look at mugshots and those types of activities. But facial recognition technology per se, we are not,” he said.
The RCMP did not respond to a request for comment by deadline Monday.
Some experts and civil society organizations have called for a moratorium on the use of facial recognition by law enforcement. Therrien noted his office doesn't have the power to impose such a ban. “We as data protection authorities cannot impose a moratorium that has the force of law. For a moratorium to be binding on police agencies, it would have to take the form of legislation,” Therrien said.
Colin Stairs, chief information officer for the Toronto Police Service, said at last week's meeting that he didn't believe a moratorium is necessary.
He said there is a “balance of goods” when it comes to the use of such technologies with “social good around public security and safety against privacy and human rights challenges with the technology.”
“So the question is, when do we deploy this technology? And for us it's only in major crimes, major cases.”
Stairs said the Toronto Police is not using facial recognition “broadly.”
“We're using it where there's a significant benefit to public safety, around the identification of individuals who are involved in violent crime."
Stairs also told MPS the Toronto police are not using AI technology to sort through photos of protesters. He said the force does use facial recognition to compare photos uncovered in investigations against the mugshot database.
“When the public thinks of facial recognition, they think of TV shows and movies where every camera has facial recognition applied to it,” he said.
“What we're doing is taking crime scene photos gathered from cameras that would be recording the street regardless, taking a still from that and comparing to the mugshot database.”
AUTHORIZED PURPOSES SHOULD BE COMPELLING AND PROPORTIONATE TO THE VERY HIGH RISKS OF THE TECHNOLOGY