Information & Ethics committee  Not yet, and that's what I'm hoping you and other legislators will get your fine minds around.

Information & Ethics committee  One would be sanctity of personal data, so protection of certain data, like facial data, that's very intimate to the individual. I think that's part of it, but I think it would also aim to ensure alignment with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and also be potentially a secure repository of data that can be exchanged and verified and is much more cybersecure than might be out there.

Information & Ethics committee  I think the horse has left the barn to a great extent, to the extent that you can't draw out of Clearview AI what has been already taken. When starting to think about this, particularly as children age, we aren't the only ones who have been exposed to facial recognition technology.

Information & Ethics committee  I might add that consumer companies, consumer brands and retailers are looking quite closely at the technology and are advancing how they think about sentiment analysis and perceiving how customers are feeling in a branded or transactional environment. Some people might not find that particularly threatening.

Information & Ethics committee  No, I'm not aware of how the Vancouver Police Department is using FRT.

Information & Ethics committee  I think this could be another Sanjay Khanna who happens to be working in AI and machine learning. It's not me.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll just bring up something I said earlier on drawing on as much research and insight as you possibly can on racialized minorities, first nations, children, or anyone who is more vulnerable to this sort of exploitation, or could be made vulnerable by changing economic circumstances that the government of the day and members of the various parties are concerned about.

Information & Ethics committee  I believe this is going to be a test that works its way through the courts. Assuming FRT and machine learning algorithms are used to identify criminals and not just their social media postings and so on, as happened in Ottawa, then tests are going to need to happen against the charter, in my view, to develop some legal precedent around this.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll answer that I think this parliamentary committee is taking steps in that direction by drawing on such a wide group of interprofessional and interdisciplinary experts. Another thing that's important is for there to be opportunities for employees of companies that have the largest datasets which might be used to be compelled to provide evidence on how they're using these technologies as well, in order to inform legislative approaches.

Information & Ethics committee  Picking up on the comments of my fellow panellists, and I think they've covered very good ground, you have three geographies here, U.K., U.S. and Canada, where these technologies have been employed and where a large number of lessons have been learned, particularly in the academic community, which is teaching us a great deal about what we need to safeguard, and they're doing so independently, so I think drawing on those things is critical.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, my response is that I think there could be something akin to—this is not the right phrasing—a digital charter of rights for Canadians that allows them to own and have a portable and secure form of biometric data that is considered to be sacrosanct. I know that's a bit ambitious as a thought, but it's something that comes to mind as we have this conversation.

Information & Ethics committee  I do on a personal level, absolutely.

Information & Ethics committee  I think part of the concern is that we don't know. There hasn't been transparency about what some of the implications and knock-on impacts may have been, and if there were, they may even be not clear to those who may have suffered harms that they are unaware of. It's a very tricky and challenging space to get into, which is part of the reason why transparency is such a threat to people who sometimes circumvent the law in order to gather and test what can happen through that sort of surveillance.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm trying to recall the particular conversation you're referring to, but certainly there are scenarios within which those kinds of questions are being explored, such as the extent to which someone's identity could be stolen to identify them as a terrorist actor. There are many plausible scenarios.

Information & Ethics committee  I think the frameworks can emerge only from the kind of study that this committee is doing already. There may be studies that are occurring in parallel that you need to draw upon to look at these challenges more holistically. I think that's what I would ask. Facial recognition technology is embedded in a whole bunch of other technologies, and to accelerate development requires machine learning, computer vision and a whole bunch of other sorts of areas.