Automated licence plate recognition (ALPR) systems at 50 intersections would make the city, in Brown\u2019s words, \u201cthe safest place to call home and the most inconvenient place in Canada for organized crime to operate.\u201d And he said they had overwhelming support from participants in a telephone town hall.<\/p>\n
But in the U.S., the same AI-driven technology has become a scourge.<\/p>\n
The cameras, which capture and analyze images of vehicle licence plates and other characteristics in search of suspended drivers, stolen cars and wanted criminals, have been cut down and vandalized.<\/p>\n
Meant as a public safety balm, they\u2019ve become a source of public backlash against mass surveillance and police privacy violations after revelations that data from the cameras has been used to track and deport undocumented migrants and to illegally monitor the movements of romantic partners<\/a>.<\/p>\n The American anger hasn\u2019t been matched yet in Canada. Despite Premier Doug Ford\u2019s decision one year ago to ban speed cameras<\/a>, and the repeated vandalism of Toronto\u2019s\u00a0Parkside Drive camera<\/a>, there has been little public debate about the adoption and installation of ALPRs.<\/p>\n South of the border, much of the criticism has focused on Flock Safety, which, according to DeFlock, produces most of the ALPR cameras used by U.S. police agencies. DeFlock<\/a>\u00a0has mapped more than 128,000 licence plate readers across the country.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is one of the cultural differences between Canada and the United States,\u201d said Sarmad Rafi, a data science student at the University of Western Ontario. \u201cFor better or worse, they are more interested in the notion of preserving their rights or liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n Bring the U.S. debate to Canada<\/p>\n Rafi is trying to spark a public awakening about ALPR cameras ahead of Ontario\u2019s municipal elections in October by mapping what looks to some like a burgeoning high-tech police state.<\/p>\n In June, he launched a website, Panopti.ca<\/a>, as a Canadian version of the DeFlock movement. So far, more than 600 ALPR cameras have been plotted on the map.<\/p>\n The majority appear to be in Ontario, the possible result of a 2022 decision by the Ford government<\/a>\u00a0to scrap licence plate registration stickers and give police a one-time $40-million grant to purchase their own licence plate recognition systems.<\/p>\n The technology, already widely used by private companies and municipalities for parking enforcement, is increasingly being deployed as a crime-fighting tool.<\/p>\n But privacy advocates in Canada say the growing use of licence plate readers raises the risk of misuse and could violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we have one ALPR in one location, that can tell you about people who are coming and going,\u201d said Aislin Jackson, policy staff council with the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. \u201cBut if you have a network across the city, you can track one particular car as it moves through the city and get a lot of information, potentially, about the activities of the person who owns that vehicle or the person who\u2019s in that vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n Expanded police surveillance can also make people think twice before expressing themselves, joining a protest or freely going about their everyday lives.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we know we have surveillance devices and we don\u2019t know what they do \u2026 that exerts a disproportionate chilling effect,\u201d Jackson said. \u201cThe more transparent we can be about what data we\u2019re collecting and why, and the more institutions behave in a way that demonstrates they can be trusted to colour in the lines that they\u2019ve set for themselves, the less the chilling effect is going to be.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In the U.S., Flock cameras, which feed licence plate information into a central database that clients pay to access, have been sold as a turbocharged tool that has helped find abducted children, capture fugitives from justice and reduce crime rates.<\/p>\n Len Phillips, an Atlanta-based member of the U.S. DeFlock group, said he is concerned because the cameras appeared in public spaces mostly without robust debate.<\/p>\n \u201cWe cherish our privacy, but we didn\u2019t know what was happening,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A key moment in the anti-Flock movement came last February with the broadcast of a Super Bowl commercial<\/a> to promote a new function of Ring home security cameras. The company proposed a feature allowing people to harness the collective power of their doorbell cameras to help find lost pets.<\/p>\n