Waterloo Regional Police Service is utilizing surveillance expertise to observe personal chat rooms, in line with a new report from the University of Toronto.
The report raises issues concerning the police division’s use of the expertise, which is named the ICAC Baby On-line Safety System (ICACCOPS), as reported by the CBC.
The expertise is an algorithmic social media surveillance system that may scrape conversations from personal chat rooms. It could actually additionally intercept chat rooms which might be password-protected.
Kate Robertson, a analysis fellow on the college and the co-author of the report, notes that it is a regarding instance that was uncovered throughout her analysis.
“It’s an instance of one of many automated surveillance applied sciences which might be more and more, and troublingly, being deployed by Canadian police providers, usually on a secretive foundation,” she informed the CBC.
Robertson notes that in a single occasion, she discovered that the police division had used the surveillance system with out a warrant.
Waterloo Regional Police informed the CBC in an announcement that it started utilizing the surveillance techniques 10 years in the past, and that the division makes use of it “routinely” now.
The division additionally mentioned within the assertion that using the expertise is supported by the province, and that officers use it to research web little one exploitation and sexual abuse.
Supply: University of Toronto, CBC News
