When security intrudes on our lives

When security intrudes on our lives

Voice-print systems offer safety in an insecure world, but how much privacy should we sacrifice?

Gerry Bellett, Vancouver Sun

Published: Tuesday, April 15, 2008

One recent Monday morning, Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland phoned Aeroplan to change his seats on a flight he plans to make May 15 and found he was being asked to submit to being "voice-printed."

Was this just another example of companies adding more layers of security to protect themselves and their customers from the ravages of identity theft or something more sinister?

Kurland is betting on the more sinister.

Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland says safeguards are needed to regulate who can have access to our biological data, such as voice prints and iris scans.

"It was quite a shock to find Aeroplan using an Orwellian system such as this," said Kurland, who recently travelled to Toronto to lecture on access to information.

When he had called Aeroplan's automated answering system, a recorded voice told him that a new security feature had been added.

"We have introduced a voice print security feature and in the future I'll use this voice print to verify your identity," he was told by an automated voice.

Kurland's reaction was to hit the zero button on his phone and keep pressing until an operator came on who changed his seat without the necessity of being voice-printed.

He wants to know why this feature has been added to Aeroplan's service and worries that voice prints of customers will be part of an "international matrix that will allow foreign governments to retrieve and store a voice print voluntarily supplied by a Canadian citizen."

But Aeroplan's Michele Meier said that would not happen.

"We have a stringent privacy rule that prevents us giving that information to anyone. This is just an in-house system to make it easier for customers to get service," Meier said.

She described the system as voice recognition technology that was introduced last year.

"As far as I know this is the first time anyone has complained about it," she said. "Our members seem to appreciate it."

Aeroplan has four million members, the majority living in Canada, with half a million customers living in other countries.

Anyone who didn't want to use the voice-print system could deal with Aeroplan using e-mail or direct phone lines, Meier said.

But Kurland wasn't reassured by Aeroplan's explanation.

"They might not be giving the information over as such, but government agencies might have the right to have access to it," he said.

"At the end of the day there will be no controls over my voice print once I've given it. So Canadians who voluntarily offer the voice print have just said goodbye to their personal information. It's the technological equivalent of being fingerprinted," he said.

Meier said the voice prints would not be accessible to outside agencies.

"It's an internal system and nobody outside has access to it," she said.

For Kurland, the request for voice imprints is just one more demand being made by companies and governments pushing people to prove their identity by submitting to such things as iris scans and fingerprinting.

If the Canadian government got access to voice prints it would have to share them with other countries, he said, due to international conventions covering the sharing of information for security purposes.