Toronto Police Service, RCMP disagree with moratorium on facial recognition technology

The Toronto Police Service’s chief information officer said the department is not planning to put a moratorium on its use of facial recognition technology despite calls by experts to implement one until the technology is better analyzed. Colin Stairs made the comments Thursday before the House of Commons’ Ethics committee as it studies the impacts of the use of facial recognition technology. To date, the majority of the witnesses who appeared before the committee have recommended a moratorium on law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technologies. Conservative MP Ryan Williams asked Stairs if, at this point, the service is considering a moratorium or if a moratorium is “something that should be happening” in the force until the technology is examined further. “I don’t believe so,” Stairs replied. “There is a balance of goods around this: social good around public security and safety against privacy and human rights challenges with technology," he told MPs. "So the question is ‘when do we deploy this technology’ and for us it’s in major crimes and major cases. We’re not using this technology broadly, we’re using it when there’s a significant benefit to public safety… around violent crime.” Facial recognition technology entered the spotlight after it was reported that the RCMP and several police departments have been using Clearview AI, the purveyor of a facial recognition technology that had its data breached and its entire client list leaked to BuzzFeed News. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) later announced two separate investigations in 2020, one into the technology, and one into the RCMP’s use of it. In 2020, some 31 civil society organizations called for a ban on law enforcement use of the technology, after the NDP called for a moratorium earlier in the year. A year later, British Columbia’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner – in conjunction with the federal OPC – found that the software company engaged in “illegal mass surveillance.” Paul Boudreau, acting deputy commissioner with the RCMP’s Specialized Policing Services said that none of the RCMP officers who gave the greenlight to use Clearview AI have been reprimanded in any way. He also noted to committee members that the RCMP “does not agree with the full recommendations or findings” of the report, although they fully support the guidance. Boudreau said that since the report, the RCMP has looked at all new technologies from a legal, ethical, and privacy perspective. He said the RCMP found that the use of facial recognition technologies should be targeted, time limited, and subjected to the verification of trained experts. He said it should only be used as a legal aid, subject to human intervention, and never used to confirm an identity. Boudreau added that RCMP is not currently using “new or advanced” facial recognition technologies, but when it was using Clearview there was human intervention “every time.” Stairs said the Toronto Police Service will always use human intervention while using facial recognition technologies. “So what we're doing is we're countering that bias by having a hurdle rate which we don't consider a match. And so if the technology is weaker then it actually does not disfavor the generally racialized minorities who have darker skin tone,” he said, adding that a match is not considered an identity until it is corroborated by additional human intervention methods. -- Reporting by Jenna Cocullo at jcocullo@thewirereport.ca and editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca.

Toronto Police Service, RCMP disagree with moratorium on facial recognition technology

News | April 28, 2022

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