This project - Enter the Ring - aims to be the start of a conversation on regulation through the examples of facial recognition technology (FRT) and Amazon Ring surveillance camera doorbells. FRT and Amazon Ring doorbells (and similar devices) have become widespread across Canadian society.
Consider your travels today - in your home, neighbourhood, your commute and your workplace. Surveillance cameras have become ubiquitous and, as we will see, FRT can be added on to surveillance cameras with relative ease.
The regulation of emerging technology in Canada has been persistently reactive since the waves of privatization of the 1980s when government expertise gained in previous decades of purposeful participation in research and development was lost to the very sectors government claims to regulate. Today, we see regulation, or at least efforts to cope with the implications of emerging technologies, occurring in vastly different venues from traditional regulators. The CRTC and ISED have taken a backseat of sorts to the intelligence services - CSIS and CSEC. It is heartening that parliamentary bodies have recently taken interest - as seen in the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (ETHI) facial recognition technology (FRT) study and report in 2022.
Canada has become stuck in a reactive regulatory cycle wherein technologies emerge, take root and become part of the social, economic and political fabric, and then, perhaps eventually, somehow become regulatory targets. Technologies such as AI and FRT become embedded in society with accelerating speed, presenting us with a situation where traditional approaches to regulation are essentially meaningless.