Members of the committee, I'm delighted to be participating in this important study.
I'll begin by briefly introducing myself. My name is Françoys Labonté, The Chief Executive Officer of the CRIM, the Computer Research Institute of Montréal. I have a technical background, a PhD specializing in computer vision from the École polytechnique de Montréal. In 2010, I joined the CRIM and became its CEO in 2015. The CRIM has worked on artificial intelligence for many years, almost from the moment it was it established, and had very practical opportunities to work on the development of speech recognition technologies in the 2000s, and on facial recognition in the 2010s.
In keeping with the CRIM's approach, my presentation will be very pragmatic. Right from the outset, it's essential to understand that basically, facial recognition technologies neither require nor involve any personal information. These technologies are limited to showing whether a new image of a face that has never been entered before into a given system matches an image that is already in the system.
In the context of your study, I understand the interest in establishing contexts in which it might be acceptable to link personal information to a face and to be able to identify an individual on the basis of one or more images of that person's face. One of the great challenges for your committee is to strike a proper balance between concerns pertaining to privacy, social acceptability and societal benefits.
We are facing a somewhat paradoxical phenomenon: for many Canadians, one or more images of their face to which their name is directly linked, not to mention other personal information that may sometimes be associated, are already publicly available, whether in social networks, digital media or other digital applications. These images were often supplied by people when they had a particular use in mind, but they agreed to very broad consent clauses and very extensive use rights. Even if someone supplied an image of their face unintentionally, for example to add it to their user profile in a digital application, then in practice it's relatively easy for third parties to access the image and other associated data and to use them with impunity for various other purposes, because the consents obtained are so broad. Practically speaking, it's virtually impossible to reverse the situation and make these images disappear from the Internet, or even to dissociate the personal information linked to them.
Here is a question your committee should look into: given that images of most Canadians' faces, to which their personal information is linked, are publicly accessible, what uses of these images that involve facial recognition ought to be proscribed or strictly circumscribed?
There is probably a strong consensus among Canadians for banning the use of facial recognition technologies in a Big Brother manner, with databases containing images of everyone's face, and public surveillance cameras arbitrarily tracking people's movements and behaviour. Likewise using facial recognition in conjunction with drones in a military context for targeted assassinations would certainly run counter to any initiatives to promote the ethical use of artificial intelligence.
I deliberately want to get you to see things somewhat differently in a context where the answers are probably not so clear-cut and where facial recognition technology is simply replacing or substituting for other existing technologies.
Let's take the example of using facial recognition technology for people in a retail store or a shopping centre. It's easy to draw a parallel with e-commerce which, has gained widespread, though not unanimous, social acceptance. When we shop online in a manner that is considered anonymous, by which I mean that it is not connected to any user account, cookies nevertheless leave behind traces of our time on the web. These cookies are then used to send us advertising on the basis of our preferences. Is that very different from a facial recognition system in a shopping centre, which without explicitly knowing your identity, could on the basis of factors that could readily be inferred from your face or your behaviour, send you targeted advertising?
Similarly, when we shop online, but now by means of a user account to which we have supplied some information…