While American cops have been accelerating the use of facial recognition technology over the last year, the Calgary Police Department has become the first law enforcement agency in Canada to implement it.

Calgary police officials told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on Tuesday that the new facial recognition software, made by NEC, will allow officers to take photos and video stills from the field and compare them at lightning speed against its database of 300,000 mug shots.

"This technology will not be used to identify people walking down the street as a member of the general public," Inspector Rosemary Hawkins told the CBC. "It will be used to identify subjects involved in criminal activity under police investigation and the image searched against our mugshot database, which holds photos of people that have been processed on charges."

Calgary police did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. NEC spokesman Frank Puglia told Ars that the company has "multiple customers in the US, and they have used our solutions for many years," but did not answer specific questions as to where or how it is used.

On the heels of that news, a mayoral candidate in Surrey, British Columbia, now wants to bring it west, too.

"I want to talk with our local [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and the City of Calgary to see how we can put this kind of technology to work in our city," Linda Hepner said in a statement on Tuesday. "Putting facial recognition technology to work will help police do their job even faster, and that’s an important part of proactive policing."

Catching up to the US

In September 2014, the FBI announced that its Next Generation Identification (NGI) is at "full operational capability." Back in June 2014, the National Security Agency proclaimed that its facial recognition program is completely legal and will not be used indiscriminately against Americans.

Facial recognition is also being used locally in the US. Seattle adopted it in March 2014. Numerous towns in Florida use it too—Chula Vista, California, brought its system online about a year ago.

"As always our biggest concern is that these systems not be used for mass surveillance," Jay Stanley, a policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, told Ars.

"Anything that hints of dragnet collection or search, one question is that there are always questions of accuracy, especially photos of people in the wild are often not very accurate," he said. "They’re most accurate where they’re in a controlled situation, where you can control angle and lighting. But we don't want to see this result in people getting hassled because a computer mistakes them for somebody else. What are the success rates of these things? The police will brag as they have when they catch somebody using it, but we’re not likely to hear about it if they go banging down the wrong door. It would be good for the public to know what the overall success and error rates are."

Despite the public pronouncements from facial recognition technology vendors (like NEC), experts note the tech is hardly a panacea.

Anil Jain, a professor of computer science and facial recognition expert at Michigan State University, told Ars that "great advances" in the field in recent years have made such mugshot database searches possible.

"However, the performance of face recognition systems depend on the ‘quality’ (pose, illumination, resolution, expression) of the acquired image," he said by e-mail.

Jain pointed to a study this year by the National Institute for Standards and Technology that found that searching a mugshot database of 1.6 million found recognition accuracy to be 95.9 percent.

But he warned that when taking an unknown image of questionable quality or one that is not taken under ideal conditions, recognition capability can drop to as low as 60 percent.

"The evidence on the effectiveness of surveillance technologies like facial recognition is mixed," Stephen Rushin, a law professor at the University of Illinois, told Ars. "There is evidence that surveillance can reduce some types of crimes—particularly property crimes—and help police with apprehending criminals. But there are legitimate concerns citizens may have any time a government invests in additional surveillance technologies."

To scan face, click here

Indeed, privacy advocates remain concerned that facial recognition technology will become deployed too widely, too fast, and with too few restrictions as to how and where the facial data is kept.

"Facial recognition performs poorly under many of the conditions where law enforcement wants to use it—for example, trying to identify people on the street or captured on surveillance cameras," Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. "Even the FBI’s new facial recognition system, NGI, only guarantees accuracy 85 percent of the time. It is also unnecessary when compared to fingerprints, which have proved to be a highly effective form of identification."

"Citizens should be asking their governments to show these programs are effective and necessary, given the proven effectiveness of other tools. Citizens should also ask how their governments plan to collect, store, and share the data and what protections are in place to ensure data security and prevent data misuse."

One of the fears that many civil libertarians have is that facial recognition will be used as a way to collect substantial information about citizens—much in the same way that license plate readers are used today.

"From the perspective of a civil liberties advocate, the wide deployments that can identify individuals at a distance, is that this changes completely the dynamic of privacy in public," Harley Geiger, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Ars. "In the US we have this idea of reasonable expectation of privacy which allows for some unreasonable searches. It allows for tracking at a broad scale. It’s not just something that will identify criminals or suspects, it will be used to identify people with no relation to crime or wrongdoing."

Indeed, just last month, Vigilant Solutions, the California company that maintains the nation’s largest private license plate reader database announced last month a mobile app for police officers to scan license plates and faces with just the tap of a button. (Vigilant Solutions did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.)

"The FaceSearch element of Mobile Companion allows officers in the field to snap a photo of a willing subject and have their face matched against a gallery of over 13 million pre-populated mugshot and registered sex offender images as well as any other images that the agency uploads into its own gallery," Tom Joyce, Vice President of Product Development, said in a statement.