Give Us Your Face, Canadians

Hey Canadians, are you ready for a heaping helping of dystopia? You're unfortunately catching some strays in this wild techno-fascist future we're barreling towards here in the US.

Police in Edmonton started a pilot program to test "near-real-time" facial scanning technology built in to the body-worm cameras on cops to automatically scan and "detect threats" based on AI facial scans from the camera feed.

"It's about empowering our officers to be informed about safety risks to themselves and to the public, as well as giving them a tool to help them in real-world operations in near real-time"

—Edmonton Police Service Acting Superintendent Kurt Martin

The cameras and facial scanning comes from Axon, a company who has provided police body cameras for quite some time.

According to the city's press release about the program, it includes scanning for "individuals who have outstanding warrants for serious crimes, such as murder, aggravated assault and robbery." It goes on to clarify that "Mugshot images in the database are EPS data," which is a pretty bold way to say "we're training robots to detect faces using images we forcefully take of you when the state deems you've done bad."

Anyway, back in 2019, Axon published this post about their ethical point-of-view on facial scanning in body cameras. Here's a lil excerpt, no real relation to anything:

"These algorithms do not attempt to match the identity of the individual to a database, only to identify video frames that are likely to include faces so that they can be redacted"

Here's the thing: this is a trial program. They haven't yet rolled this out en masse, and this is one of the first field tests (that we know about). If ever there were a time to make a stink about it, it's right now.

If you live in the area, be sure your local politicians know you'd prefer to not live in a police state where your personal identity helps to fuel a machine whose stated purpose is to optimize for peace despite being a for-profit corporation.

Also, in case "Axon" isn't ringing a bell, it's TASER. Same company, they just changed their name formally a while back.

Anyway hey, if they do end up rolling this out everywhere, maybe cops would actually turn on their cameras.