Idemia in policing
Every deployment of Idemia technology by a law enforcement or justice body currently recorded on the tracker, across 1 country. Each entry is tied to a published source and carries the date it was last checked.
A deployment can involve more than one supplier. This page indexes entries where Idemia is the principal named supplier; the full vendor detail on each entry below remains the fuller answer.
Deployments
CA York Regional Police and Peel Regional Police Retrospective Facial Recognition Operational
- Legal basis
- No dedicated Canadian federal statute governing police facial recognition. Forces state they rely on common law policing powers and, where available, court orders for camera footage
- Oversight
- Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner consulted by York Police on best practice, per the force's own account
York Regional Police and Peel Regional Police use an Idemia facial recognition system to compare crime scene images against a combined database of booking photographs. Potential matches are reviewed by trained facial recognition analysts before being passed to investigators. The shared York and Peel database became operational in May 2024. This entry was previously classified on this tracker as live facial recognition, which was wrong for the same reason as the Toronto entry: this is investigative image-to-mugshot matching, not real-time scanning of people in public space. Kate Robertson of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has said she is not aware of any Canadian police service that in practice obtains prior judicial authorisation before using facial recognition, despite that being what she describes as the gold standard of privacy protection in criminal investigations.
Source: CBC News · last checked 2026-08-27