As written in The Conversation by Neil McArthur, Director, Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics
Amid the recent, dizzying advances in generative AI, it’s been easy to miss the slow but steady progress in facial recognition over the last decade. In the past few months, it has broken containment.
In the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deployed a technology known as Mobile Fortify, which uses facial recognition on officers’ cellphones to “quickly verify subjects of interest during operations.”
In the United Kingdom, the Metropolitan Police scanned 4.2 million people’s faces during 2025 using live facial recognition cameras in public areas across London. And the British government recently promised to further “ramp up facial recognition and biometrics.”
Face scans may soon be everywhere and Canada’s patchwork of privacy rules is not ready to protect us. The most striking gaps concern personal and household surveillance.
Let’s look at three examples.
Ring doorbell cameras
First, there are Ring doorbell cameras. Ring, which is owned by Amazon, has sold its cameras to millions of people around the world, including many in Canada.
Last September, Ring announced it was adding facial recognition to its cameras in the form of its “Familiar Faces” feature, which scans the face of everyone who comes to your door and identifies anyone you have added to a database. That same month, it also announced “Search Party,” an AI feature that activates cameras throughout a neighbourhood to scan outdoor footage to help find a lost dog.
Read the full story at The Conversation.
