To listen to an audio recording of this article, click here.
As noted in our previous article for the Canadian private
sector,1 biometric technologies and their uses have
advanced exponentially in the past 20 years, enabling not only
identity verification (one-to-one comparison) and recognition
(one-to-many) but also health and behavioural analysis through app
interactions, among others.
A core challenge persists despite these technological
developments: efforts to update Canadian privacy legislation have
been repeatedly sidelined (with few exceptions), leaving businesses
and governments to grapple with laws and principles that were not
drafted with biometric and other new technologies in mind. Thus,
regulators are left to express their views on the interpretation of
existing laws through guidance documents.
