My own security system flagged me, a Black woman, as an animal

The first time my home security system flagged me as an animal, I was sitting at my patio table with my morning coffee a few years ago.

I figured it was a glitch.

A few months later, it happened again as I walked across the yard to catch the afternoon sun.

More recently, while I was on vacation, the same system logged my South Asian teenaged neighbour, whom I’d hired to cut the grass, as an animal too.

This has never happened to my husband, who is white.

Two racialized people appear to produce one pattern.

My son, who is in elementary school, also told me he couldn’t chat with a friend online.

I had parental controls set up on the platform, and the age verification had read his friend, a Black boy the same age, as much older than him and blocked them from communicating.

This is no longer a glitch, I realized.

We have a real problem.

I keep returning to these moments following Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first Canada Investment Summit, which asked the world’s largest investors to put money into Canadian advanced technology .

Energy, critical minerals, defence and technology are the four things Canada is selling, yet nobody on the summit agenda appeared to ask whose faces these systems fail to recognize.

As a Canada Research Chair examining how bias shapes technologies adopted by the criminal justice system , I wonder: Can we trust these systems built to keep us from harm when they can’t reliably tell us apart from wildlife? Can we trust these systems that reinforce the adultification of Black boys? Algorithms that cause harm Canada recently released a national AI strategy , premised on AI for all.

While this is well intended, “for all” is hard to imagine when systems read me, or anyone with darker skin, as something other than human.