Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you and members. I will be speaking about facial recognition technology in terms of the individual, digital society and government. I am a consultant in the areas of strategic foresight, scenario planning and global

Information & Ethics committee  I have one more paragraph

Information & Ethics committee  A government responding to the “now” in this space will always remain behind the curve. Some technology companies and start-ups are betting that governments won't catch up. Legislators should take steps to correct this impression by instituting guardrails over longer horizons tha

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. I think you should use a technique called scenario planning. I think for the purposes that you're using it, the Oxford scenario planning approach out of Oxford University is quite useful, because it involves multi-stakeholder engagements and—

Information & Ethics committee  I'll take that. Very briefly, it depends on the contextual environment of governance of the technologies. I also think that the nature of the government within which these technologies are being employed is very important. The legislative governance and other oversight mechanism

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

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

Information & Ethics committee  I think the safeguards need to be increased, certainly for children, marginalized groups and first nations in particular. The COVID pandemic has made things worse for all of those populations, and it's important to consider what the trajectory is in order to figure out what kinds

Information & Ethics committee  No. I would need to take some time to think about where, specifically, the strengthening could occur, but there are some reports—for instance, the UNICEF “Policy guidance on AI for children” of November 2021—that could be very valuable in this context.

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 tri

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 bi

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 academi

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 ch

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 l