Privacy watchdog probes ICBC for use of facial-recognition technology

The Insurance Corporation of B.C. is under investigation for offering its facial-recognition technology to help police identify participants in the Stanley Cup Riot last month.

B.C.'s Information and Privacy Commissioner is determining whether ICBC's use of this technology complies with privacy laws.

"There is a fine balance to be struck in weighing a citizen's privacy interests and the use of personal information for law enforcement," said Commissioner Elizabeth Denham in a written statement. "This balancing of interests must be undertaken within the confines of existing law."

ICBC introduced facial-recognition technology in 2008 to counter identity theft and fraud. The software captures driver's licence photos and matches them to existing ones in an internal database. In February, the system was upgraded to allow it to match images imported from an external source to help with investigations that require outside help, according to ICBC spokesman Adam Grossman. Shortly after the Stanley Cup riot broke out on June 15, ICBC offered the technology to aid the police investigation.

At the time, Mr. Grossman had said ICBC is "well-versed in privacy guidelines. We know what's appropriate and what's not appropriate."

"If police have an open file in investigation either on a person or set of people, they would produce some paper work for ICBC … and we would then look at potential matches in our system," he said in June. "If some images match, we would inform police we made a match."

Police would need a court order to obtain the information, but Mr. Grossman did not specify what kind of information.

Mr. Grossman wouldn't comment on Friday. A written statement released by ICBC said, "It is vital that we work to protect privacy at all times. We have been in regular communications with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner over the last few weeks and will continue to fully co-operate with them. We welcome any findings that might further strengthen our practices in these areas."

The B.C. Civil Liberties Association is concerned that if unregulated, authorities could use facial-recognition technology for public surveillance.

"The public has some rights to understand what is going on here … because we're on very un-firm ground in terms of what the rules could be or should be," said policy director Micheal Vonn. "The embedding of surveillance technology within the system is a game-changer and we need to understand what appropriate rules and constraints are in this environment."

To date, Vancouver Police have not accepted the insurance corporation's help, according to Constable Jana McGuinness, a police spokeswoman.

"We are aware of the technology, but have not used it in the investigation that is currently under way," she wrote in an e-mail.

The commissioner will release a public report when the investigation is complete.