The coal mine canaries

FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGIES TARGETING CANADIAN YOUTH

Lockport, N.Y., is just 40 kilometres from the Ontario border, and has been at the epicentre of a local controversy with international implications. In early 2018, the Lockport City School District signed a contract to install object and facial recognition technology in its security cameras. But the move led to widespread concern from parents, teachers, and civil liberties groups. In May 2020, the New York State Department of Education announced they would no longer approve funding for facial recognition, and in July the state legislature passed a two-year moratorium on the use of facial recognition in schools.

Canadian youth and their parents should be as aware, and concerned, as their U.S. counterparts about the ways facial recognition technologies are creeping into their lives. Facial recognition technologies (FRTs) are being used or proposed by Canadian institutions such as universities, police departments, and immigration/national security agencies. Today's young people are already voters, consumers, and social advocates. They and all Canadians need to engage now in a critical and necessary discussion about whether FRTs are worth the cost — not only financially, but also in their far-reaching negative social effects.

Facial recognition is a catch-all term for several closely related computer systems which seek to variously identify, recognize, and analyze human faces in data from digital images or videos. FRTs are a particularly widely used form of biometrics, or technologies that measure physical and behavioural data from our human bodies to identify us. Despite the claims of their proponents, the practical utility of FRTs is dubious at best: in many cases, they just don't work as advertised. And a recent report from UNICEF warns that recognition of children and youth faces is even more inaccurate than faces from the adult population. But that hasn't stopped their use in several areas affecting Canadian young people.

Canadian elementary and secondary school boards have been less quick than their U.S. counterparts to

turn to FRTs as a school security measure, but interest is growing. According to one industry report the U.S. market for school security technologies was worth $2.7 billion in 2017. Before entering the education market, many of the facial recognition products used in schools were deployed in locales such as prisons and casinos.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of automated exam proctoring systems from companies like Proctorio and Proctotrak that use facial recognition has soared at the post-secondary level. Students at Ontario universities like my own, Western, have protested these technologies, while Proctorio recently sued a University of British Columbia employee in what he claims is an attempt to chill his criticism of the company's products.

While FRTs are not yet widespread in Canadian schools, they are becoming increasingly pertinent to another Canadian institutional context: policing. In the spring of 2020, the use of FRTs by Canadian police became a public scandal after the revelation that police forces including the

Toronto Police Services, the Ontario Provincial Police, and the RCMP had all used the facial recognition database of controversial US company Clearview AI. While an investigation by the federal Privacy Commissioner caused Clearview to leave the Canadian market, the long-term danger persists. Without clear laws governing the use of biometric data in Canada, the data collected by FRTs in certain educational contexts could also theoretically be diverted for use by law enforcement agencies.

As in education, the use of FRTs in law enforcement and national security activities has particularly grave implications for Canadian youth who are visible minorities, in particular Black and First Nations people. In Canada, both Black and Indigenous communities are over-policed, and anti-Black

and anti-Indigenous racism in Canadian police departments is of concern to international organizations like the United Nations. Individuals who are part of these racialized groups are already subject to heightened state surveillance and racist disadvantage: FRT systems make this disproportionate surveillance worse.

Yet the most ubiquitous form of facial recognition technology in Canada is likely sitting in your hand or pocket as you read this sentence. Public institutions like schools and police forces are in theory accountable to Canadian citizens — but what about FRT applications popping up on our smartphones? One especially common and popular use for smartphone facial recognition systems is to power animated “skins,” “lenses,” or “filters” — software applications which allow a user

to digitally manipulate, augment and mask their face. Social media platforms like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok all incorporate these “augmented reality” or AR filters into their camera and video interfaces. This phenomenon is hardly unique to Canada, and young people are often the target user group for these filters.

Filters built on top of facial recognition technology are a major boon for the development of FRTs, and a major problem for advocates seeking to curtail the use of facial recognition. These filters serve as “privacy loss leaders”: every day, even fun applications of facial recognition acclimatize smartphone users — especially children and young people — to FRT engagement and surveillance. By making our use of facial recognition fun and routine, these apps make the wider dangers of such surveillance less appreciable to all of us.

Given the popularity of smartphone-based facial recognition technology alongside its increasingly common use in areas like hiring, policing, and even education, what should Canadian youth

do — both to safeguard their rights to privacy and robust democratic participation? The most effective single action Canadian young people can take to stop the use (and abuse) of facial recognition technology is to work to elect politicians at all levels of government who support strong biometric privacy laws and laws supporting bans and moratoria on FRTs.

We can also all organize to demand an immediate ban of the use of FRTs in schools and by other public institutions, including law enforcement. Canadian youth deserve, and are collectively creating, innovative ways to think about how digital technologies can support their aspirations. In Lockport, N.Y., it was both young people and their parents whose advocacy helped halt the deployment of facial recognition in the local schools — and building alliances with others is a valuable way of making sure we get rid of these forms of surveillance once and for all.

THE MOST UBIQUITOUS FORM OF FACIAL RECOGNITION ... IS LIKELY SITTING IN YOUR HAND.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY IMAGES FILES Facial recognition technologies (FRTs), like this setup in San Francisco, are being used or proposed by Canadian institutions such as universities, police departments and immigration/national security agencies.