The federal government quietly tested facial recognition technology on millions of unsuspecting travellers at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport in 2016. The six-month initiative, meant to pick out people the Canada Border Services Agency suspected might try to enter the country using fake identification, is detailed in a document obtained by The Globe and Mail through a freedom of information request. The project is the largest known government deployment of the technology in Canada to date.

Classified as: McGill experts, privacy, facial recognition, facial recognition software, facial recognition technology, security, Ignacio Cofone, Faculty of Law, Benjamin Fung, School of Information Studies, Sonja Solomun, max bell school of public policy, Centre for Media Technology and Democracy
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Published on: 22 Jul 2021

The August 24 episode of "Babbage", a podcast from The Economist about science and technology news, reports on an worrisome new Russian web-site, FindFace.ru. This website allows you to input a picture of a face and do a search for that person, or someone who looks like that person, on VK.com, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. The website boasts of a 70% accuracy rate.

Classified as: Russia, data science in the news, facial recognition software, FindFace
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Published on: 25 Aug 2016
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