The capabilities and impact of artificial intelligence carry the threat of harm but can also provide societal benefits, delegates to the 45th Global Privacy Assembly heard on Monday at the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club.

Kashmir Hill is a technology reporter at The New York Times and author of the book, Your Face Belongs to Us, which is about the Clearview AI facial recognition platform of 30 billion faces built without the consent of the people who are included in the database.

Among other uses, police have employed the platform for surveillance purposes, not always with success and without negatively impacting a citizen’s rights.

Ms Hill said: “I could imagine a world in which we have privacy settings for our face like we currently have them for our profiles on social-media sites.”

Ms Hill appeared via a pre-recording on the panel Clear and Present Harms at the conference, which has attracted delegates from around the world.

Appearing on the panel were John Edwards, Commissioner, Information Commissioner’s Office, UK; Teresa Scassa, Canada Research Chair in Information Law and Policy, University of Ottawa; Rebecca Slaughter, Commissioner, US Federal Trade Commission; Jeni Tennison, Connected by Data, UK; and Zee Kin Yeong, chief executive, Singapore Academy of Law.

The moderator was Patricia Kosseim, Commissioner, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.

Dr Tennison said a balancing of interests was required.

She said the use of facial recognition helped police efficiency, enabling them to do their job.

“That is something that we as a society want to have happen, right. We need to be protected.”

Mr Edwards said: “[After our initial overtures with Clearview AI] Clearview withdrew from the UK market. We pursued enforcement action requiring that they delete any data about UK citizens.”

He said that regulatory action was subject to appeal but it demonstrated a willingness on the part of the ICO to apply existing regulatory models to new technologies.

Mr Edwards said it was important to recognise the transformative and beneficial effects of this new technology.

“I use AI every single day. I use generative AIs very frequently. These technologies deliver us content, they improve our lives, they are going to transform the way the ICO does its business eventually.

“We must recognise that there is a market for these because there is a demand for them because they create great efficiencies.

“We want society to be the beneficiary of these efficiencies and these transformations but we also need to ensure that they are deployed in ways which are cognisant of the risks and properly weigh in and counter for those.”