"That's a very slippery slope," she said. "We all have to think about what we are giving up when we act this way."
While ICBC has a rich repository of photo IDs, it has only been since last February that the face recognition software it uses - provided by the U.S. company L-1 Identity Solutions - was enabled to scan photos from sources outside ICBC's own photo database. Grossman said no data on British Columbians is stored in the U.S. and no L-1 employees have access to the data.
ICBC has had L-1's software since 2009. The software analyzes facial characteristics that don't change, such as the size and location of cheekbones and the distance between a person's eyes. In 2010, the software aided in a number of convictions for identity theft and fraud.
In one case, when a woman took a road test using her sister's name the software revealed she had been prohibited from driving. In another case, the same person's photo appeared on two difference licences. An investigation revealed that one of the identities used to get a driver's licence and register and insure several vehicles was that of a dead person. In another case, someone in organized crime who had been deported was found out when he applied for a driver's licence using another man's identity.
ICBC's offer to the Vancouver police would mark the first time the software has been used for outside purposes and privacy experts warn it marks an alarming anti-privacy trend that could see the huge amounts of information collected in databases used for other than their originally intended purposes. Chow-White said in the case of the ICBC database, the function creep has extended across organizations. And he points out that the face recognition software, which may not be entirely accurate, scans the entire database and not just suspects.
"it widens the surveillance net, instead of those under surveillance, everybody comes under their surveillance net," he said.
While Grossman didn't have specific statistics on accuracy of the software, he said analysts check the results when the software turns up a match. The issue of inaccuracy with face recognition software is one raised by many privacy and security experts, including Kris Constable, director of the Victoria-based PrivaSecTech, which specializes in information security and privacy technology. He said face recognition software could result in a lot of false positives.
"It is realy hard to do it right without false positives," he said. "Google tried and they were unsuccessful and they just gave up. Why do we as citizens accept that this is happening?"
Constable, who is also on the privacy and access committee of the BC Civil Liberties Association, said concern was raised with the introduction of the enhanced driver's licence database that there could be potential uses and abuses outside of the original purpose of the database.
"This is the what if we brought up at the beginning," he said of the face recognition scanning for riot suspects. |
發表於 2011-6-24 18:29
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