Each year, the RCMP receives tens of thousands of photos and videos of alleged child pornography of technological giants such as Google or Meta, all the mandatory reports of Canada.
But although most of these images are not considered harmful, the RCMP still plans to store them for 100 years.
This arose after a Montreal lawyer argued that his client, accused of accessing child pornography through a messaging application, violated their constitutional rights when AI Software automatically marked and sent the images to the Canadian police.
“We ask the Court to avoid abuses from a point of view of privacy,” said Félix-Antoine Doyon.
“The courts must put their nose in the equation to balance the situation and prevent the State from collecting, again, private things of people who have not done anything illegal.”
In July, his request for a suspension of the procedures for his client was rejected in a Quebec decision court.
In the case of its client, it was the Kik messaging service that sent images through the National Center for missing and exploited children (NCMEC), a non -profit organization of the United States, to the Canadian authorities.
Doyon argued that the procedures constitute an illegal search or seizure. However, the Court confirmed the legality of the process, stating that Kik’s and NCMEC actions complied with US law and did not violate Canadian constitutional protections.
70% of the dismissed reports, but the content is still stored
The case revealed that about 70 percent of the reports marked by the AI software are dismissed by the NCMEC, while the rest are sent to the authorities, according to judicial documents.
According to the Court’s decision, several factors can prevent a file from being sent to the Police, even when the reported material does not clearly comply with the definition of the Criminal Code of Child Porn, such as Memes or humorous content that is considered too lower to guarantee resources, or when the reports generated by AI without human validation are not involved illegal content.
In Quebec, the RCMP Infant Exploitation Unit found that approximately 55 percent of the reports received in 2023 were not penalties and the cases were closed.
Doyon’s request for a suspension of the proceedings revealed from collected images remains with Ocean, a database of application of the Law administered by RCMP used to store information on reports of suspected suspicion of child sexual exploitation online. Even if the report is closed, the data is preserved for a century under the RCMP policy, as shown in the judicial documents.
Access to the ocean is strictly limited to police members who work on child exploitation investigations online, according to documents. Researchers can use information, such as IP addresses, to see if it coincides with previous reports or ongoing research, but Ocean does not automatically share data with other databases.
While Doyon’s request was rejected and his client’s criminal case continues, he said he will take his argument to the Supreme Court of Canada if necessary.
Canada’s privacy laws outdated decades, says the professor
According to Luc Lefebvre, president of Crypto.québec, a cybersecurity, privacy and technology and technology technology organization.
“With the happened of automatic learning and artificial intelligence, all different cloud platforms are using these systems to automatically mark such content,” he said.
In Canada, companies must inform the suspicion of child sexual abuse online under the laws of mandatory reports established in 2011 to protect children and help police investigations.
Evan Light, a communications professor at the University of Toronto, said that Canada’s privacy laws are decades and cannot deal with the current reality of technology and the application of the law.
“And then we have a quite large open space in which the police can do what they want essentially,” he said.
Light said there is a conflict of interests when the government is asked to put “railings in their own ability to invade people privacy, and I think that governments generally do not want to do that.”
CBC News contacted the RCMP but did not receive an answer.
