Last spring, federal and provincial privacy watchdogs told the committee that Canadian law needs to “explicitly define” when law enforcement can use facial recognition to avoid “generalized surveillance.” The RCMP says it’s meant to “bring more transparency to the processes that govern how the RCMP … approves the use of new and emerging technologies.”īut Kate Robertson, a criminal lawyer and research fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said an internal review is “not sufficient… to ensure that human rights are protected.” She said police forces should be transparent about the novel surveillance tools at their disposal, and Canada should establish “clear and proportionate limits on the use of those technologies.”Ī parliamentary ethics committee has been studying the use of facial recognition technology since 2021, and has met twice this month to consider a draft report, which is expected to land very soon. It adds that, in both cases, “Divisions reporting use have been advised to cease using facial recognition capacity until a full assessment by the RCMP through the National Technology Onboarding Program is complete.” That program was created in March 2021, in direct response to the Clearview AI debacle. In the documents, the RCMP says it uses Traffic Jam and Spotlight “to locate and identify exploited children who are publicly advertised on the internet for the purpose of a human trafficking investigation and child rescue.” Police can use them to match a photo of a child’s face to online sex trafficking advertisements. Where Clearview AI imposes no real limits on how law enforcement and government agencies can use its database of images, both Traffic Jam and Spotlight are marketed as tools to fight human trafficking, and child sexual exploitation in particular. The RCMP says it has been using both programs since 2016. Both use Amazon’s facial recognition tool, Rekognition. The second, Spotlight, was developed by the nonprofit Thorn, co-founded by actors Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, and is made available to law enforcement free of charge. The first, Traffic Jam, was developed by an American tech entrepreneur, Emily Kennedy, to help police stop human trafficking and find missing people. However, the RCMP seems to have used at least two other facial recognition tools in addition to Clearview AI in its efforts to fight child sexual exploitation and human trafficking, according to the documents, which were provided in answer to a question from a Conservative member of Parliament. In February 2021, Canada’s federal privacy watchdog declared that “what Clearview does is mass surveillance, and it is illegal.” In Canada, after initially denying it had used the software, the RCMP in February 2020 publicly acknowledged having used Clearview AI in 15 child sexual exploitation cases, and said other units were using it on a “trial basis” to “determine its utility to enhance criminal investigations.”Ĭlearview AI stopped offering its services in Canada and suspended its contract with the RCMP in July 2020, in response to a joint federal-provincial privacy investigation. In 2020, The New York Times published an investigation of Clearview AI, a tech start-up that claimed to have scraped 3 billion images of people from the internet and sold access to law enforcement agencies. “It’s not a simple matter to determine which police forces are using what surveillance tools and that’s a fundamental flaw of accountability that we keep seeing in policing,” said Brenda McPhail, director of the privacy, technology and surveillance program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
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