Air Canada rolls out facial recognition technology at boarding gates for domestic flights

Air Canada has rolled out facial recognition technology at its gates in Canadian airports.

The incorporation of facial recognition technology for boarding domestic flights is regarded as a massive expansion of the airline's digital identification program. 

According to Air Canada, the technology is designed to offer passengers a quicker and more streamlined boarding experience while adhering to Transport Canada’s biometric implementation guidelines.

As the first Canadian airline to implement facial recognition for domestic flights, Air Canada enables passengers to verify their identities within seconds at camera-equipped gates, removing the necessity for physical IDs or boarding passes.

Air Canada said its implementation of facial recognition for domestic flights complies with the International Air Transport Association's One ID initiative, which aims to create seamless passenger experiences through digital identity management.

Launched as a pilot project in February 2023, the digital ID option has been available at Air Canada’s Maple Leaf lounges in Toronto, Calgary and San Francisco, and the airline plans to unveil it at other Canadian airport gates...<<<Read More>>>...

Swedish Police Want to Fight Crime with Live Facial Recognition

 The Swedish police want to use facial recognition in real time to crack down on serious crimes.

Government investigators have already drafted a bill that will make it possible to use the technology. The regulation, however, still needs to be completed before it can be tabled, National Police Chief Petra Lundh told publicly funded radio broadcaster Sveriges Radio last week.

Lundh also noted that the legislation must comply with the EU AI Act and could potentially be temporary until crime rates settle down.

Sweden has been experiencing a flood of gang-related attacks, including firearms and explosives, leading the Scandinavian country to crown itself with the title of highest per capita gun violence rate in the European Union. Police Chief Lundh believes law enforcement agencies could use cameras to find suspects.

“It is not unusual that we have a picture of the likely perpetrator, but then we cannot find him or her,” Lundh says.

The suggestion has already been met with criticism. The technology could make incorrect matches for people with dark skin leading to perceptions that the AI is racist, says lawyer Kristofer Stahre.

“I am worried about what consequences it may have for the Swedish people,” he says.

The Swedish government has been working on expanding the use of biometric data in policing on other fronts.

In September, the Swedish Legislative Council announced it does not object to a government proposal to expand police access to DNA and biometric databases for investigating serious crimes. The proposal was submitted to the Council in July and includes a wider collection of biometric data during investigations, introducing new biometric registries and matching with the Migration Agency’s fingerprint and facial photo registry. The new regulation also allows for the use of DNA-based genealogy during investigations of murder and aggravated rapes.

The police noted that it has already successfully used biometric databases to solve a 24-year-old cold case involving a child sexual assault by matching DNA samples.

The next legislative step for the proposal is the Swedish Parliament. If the Parliament approves the amendment, it will enter into force on July 1st, 2025....<<<Read More>>>...

Spain turning into a police state: Spanish police to use automated facial recognition technology soon

  Spanish police are treading dangerous ground in their bid to make their jobs easier and faster. They intend to use an automated facial recognition (AFR) technology dubbed the ABIS, or automatic biometric identification system, in their pursuit of criminals.

Never mind that they are threatening to engulf the basic rights of citizens in the process.

Never mind that many quarters have opposed the ABIS, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify suspects from a database that contains millions of images of crime suspects and detainees already on file in Spain.

Never mind that a controversial case in the United States saw the wrongful arrest of a Michigan resident named Robert Williams based on a hit from an AFR software that turned out to be inefficient in identifying people of color....<<<Read More>>>...

Legal Complaint Filed Against Co-Op’s “Orwellian” Facial Recognition

Big Brother Watch claims supermarket biometric scans of “thousands of shoppers” is “unlawful” and “Orwellian in the extreme.”

Privacy rights group Big Brother Watch issued a statement last Tuesday stating they had filed a legal complaint with the Information Commissioner claiming that Southern Co-operative’s use of live facial recognition cameras in its supermarkets is “unlawful”. The legal complaint, sent via the group’s lawyers from data rights firm AWO, claims that the use of the biometric cameras “is infringing the data rights of a significant number of UK data subjects”.

Southern Co-operative supermarkets use facial recognition software with surveillance cameras from Chinese state-owned firm Hikvision, which also provides cameras for the CCP’s concentration camps in Xinjiang and has been associated with serious security flaws. The firm is banned from operating in the US and a group of senior parliamentarians recently urged the Government to ban the cameras from the UK.

Big Brother Watch is a UK civil liberties campaign group fighting for a free future. “We’re determined to reclaim our privacy and defend freedoms at this time of enormous technological change. And we fight to win,” their website states.

Facial Recognition Backlash Grows

[David Icke]: When the American Civil Liberties Union ran a test of Amazon.com Inc.’s facial recognition technology, the software falsely matched 28 members of Congress, many of them minorities, with mugshots of arrested people from police files.

Now, some of those lawmakers are drafting new legislation to curtail the use of facial recognition by police departments and government agencies. They’re looking to harness the public outrage over police misconduct and racial inequities, which have also put tech companies on the defensive over their sales of these products.

Civil-rights advocates have long complained that facial recognition tools promote bias by misidentifying people of color. But it’s taken the widespread anger and sorrow over the death in police custody of George Floyd, an African-American Minneapolis man, to galvanize the debate....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...

The Extinction of Privacy and Personal Security Via Biometrics and the Cashless Society

[David Icke]: In a survey of 1,000 UK shoppers by the retail personalisation company RichRelevance, respondents were asked to rate a suite of in-store shopping technologies as either “cool” or “creepy”, and facial recognition fell decidedly on the creepy end of the scale.

In this survey it was found that companies will soon be using a range of technical tools to achieve sales via personalised product recommendations and promotions.

With screens displaying their products, possibly utilising an image of you and even getting assistants to bring products, say clothes, and automatically unlock dressing room doors.

Of course, the only way they can do this is by using facial recognition systems. As soon as you walk in store, your mobile gives you away. This provides the retailer with sufficient information to identify your age and gender, whether you are are a high-value customer and your spending habits. All of this was found to be very ‘creepy’ by respondents.

There are no laws or guidelines limiting their use and as soon as it gets into the wrong hands problems occur. One would not normally think that our own security services would be a threat to innocent civilians going about their lawful business....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...

Revealed: Big Brother facial recognition cameras are watching you more than ever - being used by ten police forces, councils and hundreds of shops across Britain

[David Icke]: The secret expansion of controversial facial recognition technology has been laid bare after an investigation by The Mail on Sunday discovered it is now being used by ten police forces, councils and hundreds of shops.

Civil liberties groups are increasingly worried by the spread of the 'Big Brother' cameras which record a person's face as they walk along a street and convert the image into an 'algorithmic pattern', or 'biometric print', which is compared to faces on a database of suspects.

If a match is found, police officers can be ordered to stop and search this person.

A secret Home Office document, seen by this newspaper, names the ten police forces in England and Wales that have trialled live facial recognition (LFR) technology and are now ready to roll out the cameras for wider use...<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...

How can a small patch of printed material fool A.I. surveillance?

[Natural News]: This one’s for sci-fi lovers: A team of machine learning researchers from KU Leuven in Belgium found a simple hack to trick surveillance systems into thinking that a person is invisible.

In their paper, which they presented in this year’s Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, the team revealed how wearing a colorful printed patch no bigger than a vinyl record is enough to evade an artificial intelligence system designed to detect humans.

“We believe that, if we combine this technique with a sophisticated clothing simulation, we can design a T-shirt print that can make a person virtually invisible for automatic surveillance cameras,” the researchers wrote in their report.

The team also uploaded a video to demonstrate how the patch works. In the video, two researchers stood in front of a camera outfitted with an algorithm that identifies objects and humans in the frame. While the program marked the person without the patch, his counterpart (who was wearing the patch) wasn’t detected. As it was flipped to its blank side, the camera then detected both researchers...<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...

Chinese Citizens Will Have To Get Their Faces Scanned To Access The Internet

[Waking Times]: Internet access is already notoriously restricted in China, but things are about to get a whole lot worse. Chinese citizens are currently forced to show their ID Card in order to get the internet installed in their house, but that identification database will soon be tightened with facial recognition technology.

Starting on December 1st, Citizens of China will be required to scan their faces before gaining access to the internet or buying a smartphone.

The new regulation is a part of China’s controversial social credit system, which records the actions of every citizen and scores those actions according to their compliance with Chinese laws and customs.

If a person’s credit score drops too low, they can be banned from flying or using public transit systems, have their internet access restricted, or have their children blocked from going to the best schools. Low social credit scores can also result in being fired from a job, banned from hotels, and even having pets taken away. On the other hand, high social credit scores will result in better interest rates at banks, lower energy costs and even prioritized listing on dating sites....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...

More US Cities Seek to ban Facial Recognition Technology

[Humans are Free]: While it seems evident facial recognition technology will become mainstream in the very near future, there will be some bumps along the road. More and more US cities are effectively banning this technology as a statement against mass surveillance.

A very interesting turn of events, albeit it remains to be seen how many other locations decide to follow suit in the months and years ahead.

Over the past few years, there has been an influx of facial recognition technology on a global scale. It appears public agencies are more than eager to explore this new industry, primarily because they can get their hands on a lot of data which would otherwise remain inaccessible.

Facial recognition technology can aid in dealing with potential terrorist threats and other criminal activity, albeit it comes at the cost of privacy for all other people on this planet....read more>>>...

Facial recognition: Britain faces a dystopian future

[David Icke]: Automated facial recognition (AFR) is the state’s latest, and most invasive, surveillance technology.

Since 2015, three police forces – South Wales, Metropolitan and Leicestershire – have made use of AFR in controversial live trials. Now, South Wales Police have been taken to court by office worker Ed Bridges, who started a crowdfunding campaign when he felt his privacy had been violated by AFR.

Bridges’ legal challenge has been backed by civil-rights organisation Liberty, which argues that the indiscriminate deployment of AFR is equivalent to taking DNA samples or fingerprints without consent. According to Liberty, there are no legal grounds for scanning thousands of innocent people in this way. It also claims the technology discriminates against black people, whose faces are disproportionately flagged by mistake, meaning they are more likely to be stopped by police unfairly.

In London, AFR has been put on hold while the Metropolitan Police carries out a review. The Met is also facing a legal challenge of its own from Big Brother Watch, another civil-liberties group. Director Silkie Carlo, a vocal critic of AFR since its inception, told spiked: ‘People are right to be concerned when they can see us moving towards a police state. The result of this technology is that the normal relationship between innocence and suspicion has been inverted.’

One camera, placed in a busy, inner-city location, can scan the faces of up to 18,000 pedestrians per minute, automatically logging the features of anyone unlucky enough to walk past. A computer immediately checks these faces against a database of wanted mugs and lets nearby officers know if there’s a match.

We have previously warned on spiked against the illiberal use of this technology, and the flaws inherent in AFR policing have since become even clearer. Around 50 deployments have taken place so far in Wales alone, including during the Champions League final in Cardiff in June 2017. On that occasion, the cameras scanned 2,470 people – 92 per cent of whom were wrongly identified as criminals ...read more>>>...