The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) plans to implement an app that uses facial recognition technology to track people who have been ordered removed from the country.
The mobile reporting app would use biometrics to confirm a person’s identity and record their location data when they use the app to check in. Documents obtained through the Access to Information Act indicate the CBSA proposed such an app as early as 2021.
A spokeswoman confirmed that an app called ReportIn will launch this fall.
The CBSA said in a follow-up comment that the app could also be used for permanent residents and foreign nationals who are under investigation to determine whether they are inadmissible to Canada.
Experts report many concerns, questioning the validity of user consent and the potential secrecy surrounding how the technology makes its decisions.
Each year, about 2,000 people who have been ordered to leave the country fail to show up, meaning the CBSA “must devote considerable resources to investigating, locating and, in some cases, detaining these clients,” a 2021 document says.
The agency presented a smartphone app as an “ideal solution.”
Regular updates
The application allows the CBSA to receive regular updates on an individual’s residential address, employment, family status, among other things, which will provide the CBSA with relevant information that can be used to contact and monitor the client for any early indicators of non-compliance.
“Furthermore, through automation, the client is more likely to feel engaged and recognize the level of visibility the CBSA has into their file,” it added.
The document also states: “If a customer fails to show up for their referral, the information collected on the app will provide good investigative leads to locate the customer.”
An algorithmic impact assessment of the project, which has not yet been published on the federal government’s website, says the biometric voice technology the CBSA tried to use is being phased out due to “failing technology,” and that it has developed the ReportIn app to replace it.
It says that “facial biometric data and a person’s location, provided by sensors and/or GPS of the mobile device/smartphone” are recorded on the ReportIn app and then sent to the CBSA system. Once individuals submit photos, a “facial comparison algorithm” generates a similarity score with a reference photo.
If the system does not confirm a facial match, it triggers a process for officers to investigate the case.
“The location of individuals is also collected each time they present themselves and if the individual does not comply with their conditions,” it is stated. The document specifies that individuals will not be “constantly followed.”
Amazon wants to be reassuring
The app uses technology from Amazon Web Services, a choice that caught the attention of Brenda McPhail, director of McMaster University’s Public Policy in Digital Society program.
She said that while many facial recognition companies submit their algorithms for testing by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Amazon has never done so voluntarily.
An Amazon Web Services spokesperson said its Amazon Rekognition technology is “extensively tested, including by third parties like Credo AI, a company specializing in responsible AI, and iBeta Quality Assurance.”
The spokesperson added that Amazon Rekognition is a “large-scale cloud system and therefore is not downloadable as described in the (National Institute of Standards and Technology) participation guidelines.”
“That’s why our Rekognition Face Liveness was instead tested against industry standards at the iBeta Lab,” which is accredited by the institute as an independent testing lab, the spokesperson said.
A secret algorithm
The CBSA document states that the algorithm used will be a trade secret. In a situation that could have life-changing consequences, Mme McPhail questioned whether it was “appropriate to use a tool that is protected by trade secrets or proprietary secrets and that deprives people of the right to understand how decisions about them are actually being made.”
Kristen Thomasen, associate professor and chair of law, robotics and society at the University of Windsor, said the reference to trade secrets is a signal that there could be legal barriers blocking information on the system.
There have been concerns for years that people exposed to errors in the systems would be legally barred from obtaining more information because of intellectual property protections, she said.
CBSA spokesperson Maria Ladouceur said the agency “developed this smartphone application to allow foreign nationals and permanent residents subject to immigration enforcement conditions to present themselves without going in person to a CBSA office.”
She said the agency “worked closely” with the Privacy Commissioner on the app.
“Registration for ReportIn will be voluntary and users will be required to consent to both the use of the app and the use of their image to verify their identity.”
Petra Molnar, associate director of York University’s Refugee Law Lab, said there is a power imbalance between the agency implementing the app and the people receiving it.
“Can a person really consent in this situation where there is a huge power differential?”
If a person does not consent to participate, they can attend in person as an alternative, Mr.me Softness.
Risks of error
Kristen Thomasen also warned that there is a risk of error with facial recognition technology, and that this risk is higher for racialized people and people with darker skin.me Molnar said it is “very disturbing that there is virtually no discussion of human rights impacts in the documents.”
The CBSA spokesperson noted that Credo AI reviewed the software for bias against demographic groups and found a 99.9 per cent facial match rate across six different demographic groups, adding that the app “will be continually tested after launch to assess its accuracy and performance.”
The final decision will be made by a human, with agents overseeing all submissions, but experts noted that humans tend to trust judgments made by technology.
Mme Thomasen says there is a “fairly widely recognized psychological tendency for people to defer to the expertise of the computer system,” with the latter being perceived as less biased or more accurate.