Tag: biometrics

Canada’s Bill C-34 Would Require ID or Face Scan to Use Social Media

Canada’s long-anticipated and dreaded Bill C-34 arrived on June 10 with the usual fanfare about protecting children.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, tabled it.

Strip off the press release and what is left is a law that lets an appointed federal body order Canadians’ posts deleted across the country, decide which platforms can give an account to a 15-year-old, and tell AI chatbots to watch what you type.

It also bans Canadians under 16 from social media by charging the whole country for it, in the currency of everyone’s privacy.

The government calls it the Safe Social Media Act. Safe for whom is the question it would rather you not dwell on.

The law creates a Digital Safety Commission of Canada. Cabinet appoints its three to five members. The same body writes the rules, runs the inspections, hears the complaints, and hands out the fines, which is a regulator and a courtroom folded into one office that answers to no voter.

Everything hangs on a phrase the bill declines to nail down, “harmful content.” There are seven categories, among them “content used to bully a child” and “content that foments hatred.”

The drafters did take the trouble to say content is not hateful merely because it “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends,” which is more care than these laws usually take.

It also changes very little because the people drawing the line day to day are the platforms, working from rules the Commission can rewrite whenever it wants. The edge of what a Canadian is allowed to say can shift without anyone in Parliament casting a vote.

So here is how a deletion goes. A platform decides it has “reasonable grounds to suspect” your post is child sexual abuse material or an intimate image shared without consent.

From that moment it has 24 hours to make the post inaccessible to every person in Canada. Down first, explained afterward. You can file representations and request a reconsideration, and your words stay gone the entire time you are waiting. Or someone skips you altogether and reports the post to the Commission, which can order it made “permanently inaccessible.” No judge appears anywhere in that sequence.

The definitions get bigger the longer you look at them. “Intimate content communicated without consent” now reaches AI images “likely to be mistaken for” a real recording of a person.

As a ban on revenge porn; reasonable, depending on how it’s implemented. But as written, those same words also cover a tasteless deepfake of a sitting politician, and the person sorting one from the other works for the company that gets fined either way.

Companies do not agonize over that distinction. They delete and move on.

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ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor

Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.

In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald’s. Witnesses said an adult man allegedly tried to get the child, identified as a girl under 12 years old, to leave the restaurant with him. According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon.

In August 2024, Deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away, at the opposite end of the state. “Are you shitting me, man?” Dillon asked the arresting deputy. “I haven’t been out of Fort Myers in two years.” Further, he also said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach.

Dillon posted bail and pleaded not guilty to enticing or luring a child—a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. More than two months later, prosecutors dropped the charges after his attorney provided evidence that he was at work on the day in question.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he was only arrested in the first place, and threatened with prosecution for a particularly heinous offense, because of shoddy police work.

The ACLU is now suing the city of Jacksonville Beach, as well as the individual police officers and officials involved in the case. According to the lawsuit, the responding officer viewed security camera footage of the suspect but didn’t take a copy; instead, he took pictures of the screen with his cell phone. “In the photos, the suspect image is low resolution, and the suspect’s face is partially shadowed and off-axis,” the lawsuit claims.

When an investigator queried the facial recognition system, it was with the officer’s grainy secondhand cell phone photos.

But there were other leads that police could have followed, to either bolster their case or point in another direction. For example, when he approached the girl, the suspect was picking up food that had been ordered ahead; this implies he had an online account, with contact information and a form of payment attached.

“These records could have been used to identify the actual person who placed the suspect’s order,” the lawsuit notes. “Upon information and belief, Jacksonville Beach PD personnel never requested or obtained mobile ordering records, payment data, or online account information from McDonald’s.”

Further, the McDonald’s manager recognized the assailant as a “regular customer”—likely precluding Dillon, who lived and worked on the other side of the state and did not frequently travel. Besides, at no point did investigators search footage for the suspect’s previous visits, either for higher quality images or transaction records. And once they settled on Dillon as a suspect, investigators could have gotten a warrant for his cell phone’s GPS data, showing whether or not he was at a fast food restaurant 300 miles away from his home on the night in question.

The lawsuit notes that when Dillon’s name came up, investigating officer Scott O’Connell queried the police database of license plate readers, which did not detect Dillon’s vehicles in Jacksonville Beach within the 48 hours surrounding the attempted abduction.

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South Africa Creates Biometric Population Register to Control Migration

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on Sunday evening that his government will take major steps to crack down on illegal immigration, including the creation of an “Intelligent Population Register” that “contains biometric data for every person in the country.”

Ramaphosa said the population register would lay the foundation for a national Digital ID system, replacing the antiquated and fallible paperwork currently in place.

“The Department of Home Affairs will set a date after which the green ID books will not be recognized,” he said.

The green ID books have been standard identification in South Africa since 1986, replacing the apartheid-era population register. The books resemble passports with green covers that are embossed with South Africa’s coat of arms.

Much like a passport, the green book includes personal information such as date of birth, citizenship status, signatures, a photograph, and a 13-digit ID number that is meant to be permanently attached to each resident, similar to Social Security numbers in the United States. The South African ID number was designed to incorporate both the individual’s date of birth and special codes that would confirm the ID number was valid.

South Africa began phasing out the green books in 2013, replacing them with a “smart ID card” that includes a microchip with biometric data, but the green books were still accepted as valid identification until now.

Ramaphosa conceded that the outmoded green books have “enabled identity theft by undocumented immigrants and criminal syndicates,” while existing plans to phase them out by 2029 were not moving quickly enough to combat massive and rapidly-growing fraud.

Ramaphosa said his government will also “end the abuse of the Traffic Registration Number, which foreign nationals require to register or buy vehicles but which is being used as a form of identification.” He directed the South African Department of Transport to overhaul the vehicle registration process within three months.

The South African president acknowledged widespread corruption in his government’s home affairs ministry, with officials selling documents and helping criminal gangs exploit the immigration system. He promised a vigorous crackdown, including termination and criminal prosecution for corrupt officials.

Ramaphosa also vowed to hire another 10,000 inspectors to ensure that South African businesses are not illegally undercutting local wages by hiring undocumented migrants. He said quotas would be established for “employment of foreign nationals in any economic sector or occupational category.”

On Monday, Ramaphosa published an article in his weekly newsletter explaining that the new identification systems were an effort to address legitimate criticisms of South Africa’s loose border controls.

“We are responding to real concerns that communities have about the effects that unchecked illegal immigration has on jobs and economic opportunities,” he said.

Ramaphosa stressed that most foreigners living in South Africa were not criminals, and he cautioned against allowing criticism of migration issues to devolve into racial intolerance and violence. He asked the public to be patient while his administration works on solutions that would be consistent with the national constitution and the rule of law.

“The task of managing migration belongs to all of us,” he said.

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Facial recognition watchlist made permanent in Christchurch supermarkets after trial

A Christchurch supermarket trial of facial recognition technology has been made permanent and extended to another store after showing measurable safety improvements.

After a three-month trial, Foodstuffs South Island has decided to keep the technology at New World St Martins and Pak’nSave Papanui and Moorhouse, while expanding it to New World Stanmore.

The initiative, which ran from October 2025 to January 2026, was designed to identify and manage individuals with a history of serious and harmful behaviour in stores.

Foodstuffs South Island retail head Kent Mahon said the results gave the co-operative confidence that the system could be deployed carefully and responsibly.

“The focus has always been on reducing harm. The trial showed we can do that while keeping accuracy high and respecting customer privacy,” Mahon said.

The facial recognition system scans images of everyone entering participating stores and compares them with a watchlist of known offenders.

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“Dystopian” Police.AI Launches in UK Amid False Arrests

A new UK national center launches within days, promising to find suspects in minutes, except it costs £115 million ($155M) and occasionally arrests the wrong person.

Police.AI, the body charged with pushing dystopian artificial intelligence across all 43 forces in England and Wales, comes with a seductive sales pitch from its frontman. Catch your suspect in minutes. Turn a weeks-long manhunt into a coffee break.

Alex Murray, National Crime Agency director and the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s first AI lead, wants facial recognition to do exactly that. The catch, and it is a fairly significant one, is that the technology keeps flagging innocent people.

Murray’s whole pitch is speed. “What took days, weeks, sometimes months can potentially take hours,” he said, describing AI tools that span CCTV analysis, searches of seized phones and the flagging of fake images.

He likes to point to a Bedfordshire fraud case where the software chewed through Romanian-language phone data from four suspects and produced guilty pleas. Notice the shape of the pattern, though. It is always a list of what the police get to do. The part where the rest of us get scanned, sorted and occasionally pulled off the street tends to fall off the slide.

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They’re All Ears: Apple’s Plan to Read Your Mind

We’ve handed over our location, our browsing history, our voice, our face, and our purchasing habits. In exchange, we’ve gotten convenience. Now Apple wants the one thing each of us might have thought was still ours—the electrical activity of our brain. And this time, they’re not even asking. What are we talking about here?

In January 2023, Apple quietly filed patent US20230225659A1 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The filing describes a wearable electronic device—an earbud—equipped with multiple electrodes embedded directly into the ear tip and housing. These electrodes aren’t for audio. They are not there to improve our sound quality. No indeed. Instead, they are there to read our brain—using the same EEG technology doctors use to monitor neurological activity in clinical settings. And because every ear canal is shaped differently, Apple’s patent describes a machine-learning model that figures out which electrode combinations work best for each person’s specific anatomy, then keeps refining that over time. The result is a read that is accurate, continuous, and tailored to each of us personally. The digital signal is then transmitted wirelessly to our phone—and, per the patent’s own language, to a server, where it can be stored as “historic data” accessible by “another person given permission.”

Read that sentence again.

What EEG Actually Reveals
This is not science fiction, and it is worth understanding what EEG data actually captures—because it is a lot more than Apple’s marketing department will ever tell you. Brain waves are not background noise. They are a direct readout of our inner life. The alpha, beta, delta, theta, and gamma frequencies each correspond to distinct mental states—relaxation, intense focus, deep sleep, creativity, active learning. Together they paint an individual portrait of our mind that is more revealing than anything we have ever typed into a search bar or whispered to a smart speaker. These frequencies, as Loyola University researchers have noted, are also the same signals measured in polygraph tests—the ones used to determine whether someone is lying. They can reveal our stress levels, our concentration, our emotional state, and potentially flag neurological conditions that have not yet been diagnosed. As one researcher at the Neurorights Foundation put it in a Science Friday interview, neural circuits in the brain create our thoughts, emotions, memories, decision-making, and our very sense of self.

Apple wants that data streaming off our ears into their servers.

Are There Any Upsides?
Fair is fair—applications for in-ear EEG technology are being floated, and it’s worth addressing them. As Neurofounders reports, startups like NextSense are already developing in-ear EEG devices to improve clinical sleep staging. Detecting seizure disorders from continuous passive monitoring is another possibility. Early signals for degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s may surface in EEG data years before symptoms appear. And researchers have argued that natural-environment EEG collection—on the couch, at work, during real life rather than inside a sterile lab—would produce more accurate data on attention and cognitive states than anything gathered under clinical conditions.

These applications sound compelling on the surface. But step back for a second. Americans are not sleeping poorly because they lack a brain-monitoring device. They are sleeping poorly because they are overprescribed, overstimulated, and undernourished—and the same medical system profiting from that reality is not exactly rushing to fix it. Handing our neural data to Apple is not a solution to a pharmaceutical-created problem. It is just a new layer of surveillance dressed up as fake wellness. The idea that we should surrender the electrical activity of our brains as the price of entry for better sleep tracking should raise more than a few eyebrows.

Who Gets the Data?
Here is where things get serious. A 2024 Neurorights Foundation report pulled back the curtain on 30 companies already selling consumer neurotechnology devices. What they found should stop you cold. Twenty-nine of the thirty companies claimed unlimited rights to their users’ neural data. Most had quietly written third-party data sharing directly into their terms—buried in the kind of legal language nobody reads until it’s too late. Fewer than half even encrypt the data or de-identify users. There is no federal law in the United States governing how neural data collected by consumer devices can be used or sold. A handful of states—Colorado, California, Illinois—have moved to address this, but protections remain patchwork at best.

As a published paper in PMC bluntly put it, bulk sales of neural data by tech giants to third parties may already be occurring with minimal accountability. Data brokers could soon be cataloging individual “brain fingerprints” on a mass scale—data as uniquely identifying as a fingerprint, and infinitely more revealing.

Apple has faced its own data breach history. As Pearl Cohen’s legal analysts note, the patent describes data transmission to external servers accessible by parties beyond the user. The company that couldn’t keep our FaceID data secure wants a continuous stream of our brain’s electrical activity.

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DYSTOPIAN Truck Tech: AI Scans Faces, Reads Lips & Checks Police Database BEFORE You Can Drive

A video exposing Ford’s dystopian patents for new vehicles has gone viral on X, fueling outrage over the accelerating war on personal vehicle ownership and freedom of movement. 

The clip details in-cabin cameras, biometric scanners, lip-reading AI, emotion detection, and real-time criminal database queries – all deciding whether your truck will let you drive.

In the video, the narrator states “imagine there was an emergency outside the truck… An accident…I jump in this truck. But it won’t shift into drive. Why? Because cameras and sensors inside of my cab won’t let me shift.”

“It detects that my eyes are big. There’s some emotion. Some panic. And doesn’t feel like I’m fit to drive. That isn’t science fiction. This is happening. Ford just filed patents,” he explains.

He continues: “Ford actually has a series of patents down at the U.S. Patent and Trade Office that deal with sensors and cameras inside their cab. And if that sensor determines you’re not fit to drive, the truck won’t shift from park to drive.”

The patents extend deep into control. Biometric systems scan face, iris, and fingerprint, cross-referencing law enforcement databases before allowing movement. 

“You wake up one morning, walk out to the driveway, climb into a vehicle with your name on the title… Before you go anywhere, before you’ve done a single thing wrong, your truck has already run your face through a law enforcement database. Ford’s own patent language describes this as ‘potentially useful for police,’” the narrator further outlines.

Lip-reading tech uses interior cameras and machine learning on vast mouth-movement datasets, plus inaudible sound waves. This enables not just voice commands in noisy conditions but also monitoring for targeted ads based on conversations. 

Ford Pro Telematics also already feeds live driver video to fleet managers.

This corporate push dovetails perfectly with government efforts to restrict mobility. Just weeks ago, Massachusetts Democrats advanced Senate Bill S.2246, directing MassDOT to set binding goals for slashing statewide vehicle miles traveled (VMT) under “climate” pretexts. 

The bill creates a new council to shove residents onto public transit, hitting rural drivers hardest who rely on cars for work, family, and essentials.

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Another Wrongful Arrest Based on Faulty Facial Recognition Raises Growing Concerns

Jason Killinger walked into Reno’s Peppermill Casino in September of 2023, later that evening as he was exiting the building he would be arrested. The casino’s facial recognition system had flagged him as a “100 percent match” for an individual that had previously been banned from the property. The only problem? It was completely wrong.

After the system flagged Killinger, casino security would approach him, referring to him as “Mike”, an individual who had been previously removed from the property. Despite his insistence and ability to prove that he was in fact not Mike, security would surround and handcuff Killinger before calling the Reno Police Department. Shortly thereafter rookie Officer Richard Jager would arrive on the scene.

Killinger quickly proved he was not the man identified in the system, as he was carrying three valid forms of identification, including a Nevada Real ID compliant drivers license, his Peppermill player’s card, and a debit card, all with his name on it. When this wasn’t enough he offered to retrieve more from his vehicle, which included a pay stub, vehicle registration, and a medical card. Despite all of this copious documentation proving who he was, Officer Jager declined to investigate further, not bothering to look at any of his other identifying documents. Killinger would be arrested and charged with criminal trespass.

He would then spend 11 hours in police custody, only after a fingerprint check at Washoe County jail confirmed his identity would he finally be released.

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Mexico Speeds Up Biometric ID Rollout

Mexico’s government wants you to believe that handing over your fingerprints, iris scans, and facial data is voluntary. President Claudia Sheinbaum has said so publicly.

But by July 2026, every one of the country’s roughly 130 million mobile phone lines must be linked to a biometric national ID, and unregistered numbers get suspended on July 1.

Refuse the biometric credential and lose your phone.

The CURP Biométrica upgrades Mexico’s existing population registry code, the Clave Única de Registro de Población, from an 18-character alphanumeric string into something far more personal. The updated system captures face, fingerprint, and iris biometrics, packages them with a QR code and digital signature, and produces what amounts to a mobile-readable identity document tied to your body.

Registration happens at RENAPO and Civil Registry offices, where staff scan all ten fingerprints, both irises, take a facial photograph, and record a digital signature. You’ll need a valid photo ID, a certified CURP, and an original or certified birth certificate just to walk in.

The government has framed this primarily as a tool for addressing Mexico’s crisis of forced disappearances. The biometric data feeds into a Unified Identity Platform connecting the National Population Registry with the National Forensic Data Bank and records held by prosecutors and intelligence agencies, enabling real-time identity searches. That’s the stated purpose.

The actual system being built does considerably more than locate missing people. The legislation gives broad access to biometric and personal information to law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the National Guard, and the law doesn’t require authorities to notify citizens when their data gets accessed. You won’t know who’s looking at your biometrics, or why, or how often.

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US & EU Negotiate Biometric Data-Sharing Deal

Washington wants to run European fingerprints through American databases, and the EU is considering it. The Department of Homeland Security and the European Union are in formal negotiations over an arrangement that would give DHS direct query access to biometric records held by EU member states, a level of access that Brussels has never granted to a non-EU country for border security purposes.

The deal sits inside DHS’s Enhanced Border Security Partnership program, which effectively tells Visa Waiver Program countries to open their biometric databases or risk losing visa-free travel privileges. Washington has set a December 31, 2026, deadline for EBSP agreements to be operational. After that, DHS reviews each country’s compliance. Countries that fail to meet expectations risk suspension from the VWP, which would reimpose visa requirements on their citizens.

When DHS encounters a traveler, asylum seeker, visa applicant, or anyone flagged during immigration processing, it would query a participating country’s database using that person’s biometrics.

A match returns fingerprints and related identity data to DHS.

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