Comment by Tamir Israel

As the committee has heard, facial recognition technology is versatile and poses an insidious threat to privacy and anonymity, while undermining substantive equality. It demands a societal response that's different and more proactive than that to other forms of surveillance technology. Face recognition is currently distinguished by its ability to operate surreptitiously and at a distance. Preauthenticated image databases can also be compiled without participation by individuals, and this has made facial recognition the biometric of choice for achieving a range of tasks. In its current state of development, the technology is accurate enough to inspire confidence in its users but sufficiently error prone that mistakes will continue to occur with potentially devastating consequences. We have long recognized, for example, that photo lineups can lead police to fixate erroneously on particular suspects. Automation bias compounds this problem exponentially. When officers using an application such as Clearview AI or searching a mug shot database are presented with an algorithmically generated gallery of 25 potential suspects matching a grainy image taken from a CCTV camera, the tendency is to defer to the technology and to presume the right person has been found. Simply including human supervision will, therefore, never be sufficient to fully mitigate the harms of this technology. [...] At our borders, facial recognition is at the heart of an effort to build sophisticated digital identities. “Your face will be your passport” is becoming an all-too-common refrain. Technology also provides a means of linking these sophisticated identities and other digital profiles to individuals, driving an unprecedented level of automation. At all stages, transparency is an issue, as government agencies in particular are able to adopt and repurpose facial recognition systems surreptitiously, relying on dubious lawful authorities and without any advance public licence. We join many of our colleagues in calling for a moratorium on public safety and national security related uses of facial recognition and on new uses at our borders. Absent a moratorium, we would recommend amending the Criminal Code to limit law enforcement use to investigations of serious crimes and in the absence of reasonable grounds to believe. A permanent ban on the use of automated, live biometric recognition by police in public spaces would also be beneficial, and we would also recommend exploring a broader prohibition on the adoption of new facial recognition capabilities by federal bodies absent some sort of explicit legislative or regulatory approval.