Face Recognition Technology for the Protection of Canada’s Parliamentary Precinct and Parliament Hill?
Potential Risks and Considerations

Executive Summary

This report was prepared at the request of the Parliamentary Protective Service to examine the human rights and legal considerations for the hypothetical use of face recognition technology (FRT) in the context of ensuring physical security within Canada’s parliamentary precinct and on Parliament Hill. It demonstrates that there are substantial legal, privacy, and human rights risks associated with the use of FRT.

Faces are a type of biometric information unique to each person, and FRT determines the probability of facial similarity in images through computational analyses. Faces reveal who we are, where we come from, our families of origin, and can reveal other aspects of our lives such as our gender, race, ethnicity, health, and emotions — along with highly personal or intimate information about our lives such as our relationships, political or personal preferences, and travel patterns, particularly when our faces are examined over time. While this report focuses on the use of face recognition in the parliamentary context, it has numerous lessons that may apply to other physical security approaches including the use of biometric recognition systems.

There are currently no clear legal limits nor required safeguards regarding the collection and processing of biometric information such as facial images through automated means — a major gap in Canada’s privacy and human rights legal framework. Despite this, it is possible that the potential use of FRT in the parliamentary context, particularly for the unique identification of people through one-to-many searches, could be found unlawful and may affect the public’s trust and confidence that their privacy and other rights are being adequately protected and prioritized by their democratic institutions. This is because FRT can surveil, track, identify, misidentify, and may lead to decisions that result in people being stopped, questioned, detained and/or prevented from entry to the parliamentary precinct and Parliament Hill at significant scale and speed and in ways that are discreet and potentially arbitrary.