As facial recognition technology becomes more common, the President of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association says we should be very concerned about it.

The Vancouver Airport is the first in Canada to use facial recognition, using it for Nexus passengers instead of checking passports. Mike Larsen says there are a number of issues that the general public should have. “It has the potential to simply end privacy in public spaces. This is really the next big horizon of surveillance technology. We already have tremendous amounts of personal data that is collected throughout all aspects of everyday life.”

Larsen says this technology allows users to connect that data with our face which we simply can’t change. He says it will be like wearing your drivers licence on your forehead. “Research that has been conducted in the U.S. and elsewhere has found that the false positive rates for facial recognition technology are actually fairly high and that means a situation where the cameras and the algorithm falsely identify someone as someone of suspicion or someone whom they’re not. More than that, we found in U.S. research that your likelihood of being falsely identified is greater if you’re a woman or a person of colour. So, these algorithms are imperfect and get things wrong and if you have a camera say at an airport or elsewhere, that can have serious implications. Regardless of your behaviour simply because your face has been run against a data base and an error has been made and now you’re pulled aside.”

Larsen says that is how this starts. The technology is used in one place where some may not think about it as being a big deal and then it becomes hard to stop that momentum. “Before you know it you do see technology like this being used in shopping malls, you do see this being used in streetscape forms of surveillance and there is a lot of discussion in the U.S. about the use of facial recognition algorithms in body-worn cameras on police which basically makes each police officer a surveillance system.”