Dozens of Edmonton police officers patrolled the city’s streets in December equipped with body cameras that used artificial intelligence to scan faces, looking for what the police have deemed “high-risk offenders.”
Documents and emails obtained by CBC News offer new insight into the Edmonton Police Service’s trial of bodycam facial recognition technology — the first police agency in Canada to do so.
The AI-powered facial recognition software was trained to detect the faces of about 7,000 people on a watchlist, based on mugshots of people police say have serious criminal warrants or are flagged as potential safety risks.
Key details from the documents include:
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The privacy assessment submitted to Alberta’s privacy watchdog by EPS includes wording that experts told CBC could open the possibility of sharing sensitive information;
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A “critical fault” system outage prevented matches for several days and may have extended the pilot project;
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The facial recognition model was supplied by Corsight AI, an Israeli company whose technology has reportedly been used for mass surveillance in Gaza.
These clown cops already know who the high-risk offenders are, this is bullshit. How is Israeli facial recognition shit here in Edmonton. Fuck sake.
As someone deeply interested in the tech used behind this stuff, this is absolutely a terrible idea that only allows an excuse to harass people without actual reason.
Even if there wasn’t the same behaviour and sordid history with mind reading tactics based around the cop feeling “something is off” which, funny enough, happens to trigger when dealing with people of different culture or neurotype.
Now the technology being used famously has a problem with low data samples, which would also translate into “minority groups.”
This isn’t “evil technology,” it’s evil opportunists that found an opportunity, using a tool for something we know isn’t robust enough for such serious context.
If it’s weren’t AI it would be the charlatans around mind reading and micro expressions.
We need accountability for those with power who use said power maliciously or deceptively.
And beyond that, we all need a focus on the 1984 behaviour, as there is a weird global fascist push to protect the current power structure.
