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

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 priv

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 cre

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

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

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

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 o

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 expe

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 p

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 intrusive

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 th

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,

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 tha

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