The federal privacy commissioner and his counterparts in the province recommend the establishment of a legal framework limiting the use of face recognition by police forces.
[Cette technologie] can be highly intrusive, allow for widespread scrutiny, produce biased results, and undermine human rights, including the right to participate freely, without supervision, in democratic lifesaid the federal commissioner, Daniel Therrien, while testifying Monday before a parliamentary committee considering the question.
He added with the same breath that face recognition also has advantages if used responsibly.
However, Mr. Therrien and his counterparts in the province and territory believe that all of Canada’s privacy laws do not offer adequate guarantees against abuses of the use of facial recognition.
In a joint statement, they called for the establishment of new specific laws or updating current laws around the four main axes.
First, we want to clearly identify the situations in which the technology can be used. We also request that necessity and proportionality requirements be established for the use of facial recognition and that an independent body be responsible for monitoring how the use is made.
Finally, the commissioners also believe that steps should be put in place to ensure the accuracy of the information collected through face recognition. In particular, they believe that the law must require a person to participate in the evaluation of face matches obtained by the software.
Source: Radio-Canada
