Humans love to look at faces – our families, our friends,
complete strangers.
In some ways, our brains are optimized for facial identity recognition.
We're good at it, so of course we want to teach machines how to
do it even better than we do. Facial recognition technology is
rapidly advancing, and its use is expanding, raising concerns among
consumers, privacy regulators, legislators, and privacy
advocates.
What does current Alberta privacy law say about the use
of this technology?
First, let's clarify what we mean when we talk about
"facial recognition technology".
A range of technology components are used, usually combining
biometric software that maps an individual's facial features
and logs the data as a "faceprint", often coupled with
machine-learning algorithms. The software needs a source of images,
sometimes collected by video surveillance cameras. Social media
platforms also serve up a rich source of images of human faces, as
seen in the
