Madam Speaker, I move that the sixth report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, presented on Tuesday, October 4, 2022, be concurred in.

I am pleased to start the debate on this report, which is entitled “Facial Recognition Technology and the Growing Power of Artificial Intelligence”. My constituents in Trois‑Rivières regularly talk to me about these two topics. They are worried about these things. We hope to be able to shed light on this.

Over the past few years, facial recognition has become common. We like it when our iPhone recognizes us and every app can start opening up without us having to do anything. There is a catch, though. An iPhone recognizes a face, obviously, but who has read their iPhone's terms and conditions? Do users know what happens to the image that has been recorded? Do they know if they own their own image? What are the restrictions on the use of that image?

At the time of the study, those were the types of questions that got the committee interested in this topic. We are going to show that there are immense benefits to facial recognition. However, there are also some immense drawbacks. We are going to have to be able to weigh these types of things.

Facial recognition has obviously improved over time. The report, which dates back to October 2022, is quite relevant. However, it must be said that since the emergence of generative AI, these kinds of tools have started developing more rapidly. It is getting hard to keep up. There are no real regulations governing the use of AI or facial recognition.

A few years ago, in February 2021, the Privacy Commissioner released an investigation in which he found that Clearview AI, a facial recognition company, had violated the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. Basically, what happened was that when shopping mall customers looked at the store directory screen, their image would be recorded and they would be tracked through the mall to monitor what they were doing in order to build profiles on them. The commissioner found that these practices violated the act.

Facial recognition is more than that. There is surveillance everywhere. Many things can be associated with facial recognition. To go a step further, I would like to propose a definition of facial recognition.

Facial recognition...is the process of identifying a face from a digital image or video. [Facial recognition technology] can be deployed in real time or on static images. It uses computer pattern recognition to find commonalities in images depicting human faces.

Obviously, it does not always work perfectly. Someone may have such a bad night that their iPhone does not recognize their face in the morning. It is not perfect.

However, we have to admit that although this technology does make our lives easier, it can also poison our existence. Several witnesses told us that this identification technology sometimes has a lower success rate among Asian people and people of colour. This is a problem if, for example, facial recognition is used by police to identify a witness or an accused person, and the wrong person is identified. Obviously, a 30% success rate for Asian people and people of colour is a bit low, so clearly, we need to be careful.

Facial recognition equals identity. Identity is how someone presents themselves to the world, how they relate to others. It is the most beautiful definition of otherness, and I am certain my colleagues in the room can easily appreciate that. Otherness is how we present ourselves to others. Our face is unique. Some may say that some faces are less so than others, but our face is unique. It is a valuable source of identification.

Have any of my colleagues in the House consented to their faces being used for commercial—

René Villemure

$510,426.00