colinnew
Canadian police are quietly experimenting with dangerous new technology: facial recognition powered by our stolen images,1 spyware that breaks into our devices,2 bogus software that tries predicting when and where crime occurs,3 mass surveillance devices that spy on our phones,4 and racist pseudoscience that guesses how we look.5
The common factor in all these rights infringing exercises by Canadian law enforcement? New, untested digital technologies. More oversight of police technology is badly needed to protect people in Canada.
Sign the petition – there must be NO adoption of dangerous new digital technologies without democratic oversight!
Safety can’t come at the price of making us less safe. When it comes to investigating and surveilling citizens, Canadian law enforcement have too many dangerous and untested technologies at their disposal:
- predictive policing tools that attempt to forecast where crimes are most likely to occur, but actually just reinforce the over policing of already marginalized communities;6
- biased facial recognition technology that’s powered by databases of our stolen images;7
- social media monitoring tools that gather data on people exercising their protected right to peaceful protest;8
- mass surveillance devices that trick our phones into connecting to them;9
- spyware that breaks into our personal devices and harvests our sensitive data;10
- and tools powered by racist pseudoscience that attempt to predict how we look.11
All of this technology puts people’s lives in danger.
Time after time, Canadian police have adopted new digital technology with no proven benefits that plainly infringe upon our protected rights.12,13 Why? Because nobody is overseeing what technology they’re using.
Police governance in Canada is broken.
We need clear transparent and democratic control of what technology the police in Canada are able to use in order to make law enforcement in Canada safer and more equitable.
