Technology butts heads with privacy law in the name of innovation
Modern innovation is putting pressure on privacy law as citizens's data has become an input to production.
From Meta to the RCMP, public and private sectors have been found guilty of misusing citizen data in the past two years.
The Quebec Court of Appeal has approved a class-action lawsuit against tech giant Meta, for technology that allegedly allows Facebook users’s information to be used in discriminatory advertising practices, CBC reported on Wednesday.
The lawsuit alleges that Facebook’s advertising technology employs factors such as race, gender and age in “microtargeting.” The targeting innovation enables an advertiser to pick what kind of person they want to reach.
Nearly 100 employers including government departments were advertising with the technology, which may violate Canadian human rights law, the CBC reported.
Two years ago, the RCMP was caught illegally using citizens’s data.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada investigated a case where the RCMP partnered with technology firm "Clearview AI," using software to scrape images off the web and save them to a database.
Clearview AI saved images of Canadians so RCMP could use facial recognition technology (FRT) to match its photographs.
The use of roughly 3 billion illegally sourced images was found to have violated Canada's Privacy Act, the commissioner’s office said in a 2021 news release.
The release said the case was an example of how public-private deals involving digital technology are creating new risks for privacy.
Then-privacy-commissioner Daniel Therrien said it had implications for the future.
"As both commercial and government use of the technology expands, it raises important questions about the kind of society we want to live in,” he said in the 2021 release.
Facial recognition has also entered the private sector. In 2019, retailer Canadian Tire told CBC that it used FRT in six of its seven Winnipeg locations.
Comentários