Information & Ethics committee  I think that addition would be great in the Canadian context, as well. Also requiring that type of notice would be very—

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not aware of a list. Sometimes you get lists when there's a procurement process. Often you get a number of companies that register to sign up for that, but that takes a little bit of investigative work from journalists to really uncover that and it's never complete. I will say really briefly that some states—and Ms.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, precisely. I think that's correct. I think Ms. Bhandari is right that the database list would not capture these types of tools. Perhaps it could be a model to build on. I would also suggest that, in the European regime, some types of more intrusive techniques require a privacy impact assessment be filed with the data protection regulator early on in the process.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, absolutely. I am very concerned. The pilot did get a little bit interrupted by the pandemic, and I don't know how aggressively it's being moved forward now. I'm very concerned with the idea of using the pinpoint of the travel experience to encourage people to opt in and create these types of profiles, knowing that they're then going to be used against them, not just in border control contexts, where many marginalized communities are already at a massive disadvantage, but here and abroad, in other countries that end up implementing the same system.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely. Part of the challenge with this type of system is that, by relying on artificial intelligence assessing tools, you're able to implicitly do what you couldn't do directly. You couldn't necessarily say, “I'm not renting to you because you're indigenous,” but then maybe you could adopt an algorithm that relies on biased historical data and ends up coming to that conclusion without the transparency that would let someone challenge that type of decision explicitly.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely. That's a concern more broadly with facial recognition systems. There's a lot of back and forth in other jurisdictions—and we anticipate it will get here eventually—where airlines are incentivized to adopt facial recognition systems for border control reasons. They're even given some funding sometimes and then they use that for their own commercial reasons.

Information & Ethics committee  I would second what Ms. Bhandari is saying. It's not too late to act. I would just also add really quickly that we have a very big enforcement problem in Canada. Obviously we had rulings against Clearview here as well. Clearview is currently challenging those rulings against it from the B.C. privacy commissioner, the Alberta privacy commissioner and the Quebec commissioner.

Information & Ethics committee  I think the harm in the private sector can be even worse in some contexts than in the public sector. There's probably wider variation. We recommend empowering the Privacy Commissioner to look into the adoption of intrusive technologies and impose conditions and even moratoria on specific technologies as a meta way of addressing this.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Part of the problem with the technology is that, if there's not an explicit opt-in requirement, you're not even necessarily aware that you're being subjected to the technology. For example, with the customs screening mechanisms they have at Pearson, from the traveller's experience, you don't necessarily realize that a facial recognition scan is happening.

Information & Ethics committee  In a centralized system, all the images are held in one spot. If I were to walk up to a camera, my picture would be taken and it would be compared to the centralized database of millions and millions of images. A decentralized system would be something like what we have on our passports, where there's a digital passport image encoded on the passport.

Information & Ethics committee  In many jurisdictions, at the airports, facial recognition is not applied to travellers under the age of 14 and over the age of 79, I believe. Again, that greatly undermines any efficiency gains you get from adopting these systems, while subjecting everybody else to the intrusiveness of having to give up their biometrics.

Information & Ethics committee  I think Ms. Bhandari touched on this as well. Because facial recognition operates surreptitiously and doesn't have associations with things like fingerprinting that historically come out of a criminal justice kind of context, there's a bit less social stigma attached to it in the minds of people, although there shouldn't be, because it's increasingly used in the same context as mug shots, etc.

Information & Ethics committee  I think it really is putting people in an unfair position of having to choose that, if it's the only way they can make their airport and travel experiences a little less unpleasant. The direction things are going in is worse. There are proposals around the world to automate that screening process.

Information & Ethics committee  That's certainly a very valid and salient concern. The no-fly lists have been a long-standing problem. There have been proposals to create facial recognition-enabled lists with comparable objectives. CBSA did, in fact, pilot one for a while, and decided not to implement it yet, I think.

Information & Ethics committee  It's exactly as Ms. Bhandari said. It's a big problem, because programs like Nexus are opt in, in a sense, but the pressure to get through the border—the explicit use of the border as a pain point to encourage travellers to sign up for these types of systems—is a problem. Canada, for example, piloted a program with the Netherlands, one developed by the World Economic Forum.