There has been a surge in police use of facial recognition technology despite independent reviews citing human rights concerns, discrimination, and many incidences of innocent people being wrongly identified as criminals.
Despite this, the UK Government is still pushing for greater facial recognition surveillance in policing and supermarkets. A call for an urgent stop to governments and private companies using this surveillance has been made by leading human rights groups, and technology and equality organisations across the world.
This international action, taken by over 60 experts and 120 civil society organisations working across six continents comes at a time when governments worldwide are considering whether to prohibit or permit the use of live facial recognition, according to the UK Big Brother Watch group (BBW).
Serious Concerns
The BBW “works to roll back the surveillance state and protect the rights of everyone in the UK to be free from unfair intrusion” according to their Director, Silkie Carlo.”
“In a joint statement, the expert voices warn of serious concerns about the human rights and discriminatory impacts of facial recognition surveillance, as well as an insufficient evidence base, safeguards, legal bases, and democratic mandates to justify the use of the controversial technology,” she says (source)
In June 2023 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) endorsed a blanket ban on police using AI-powered facial recognition surveillance in public spaces, under the AI Act.
Subsequently, this would mean rejecting an amendment that could have paved the way for law enforcement to resort to real-time biometric identification in exceptional cases. according to Euronews, who say that the total ban is part of a draft piece of legislation, known as the Artificial Intelligence Act, that aims to ensure the development of human-centric, ethically responsible, and environmentally sustainable AI systems across Europe.”
Euronews explains that: “Biometrics refers to systems that analyse biological features, such as facial traits, eye structures, and fingerprints, to determine a person’s identity, usually without the person’s consent. Its possible use by government agencies has been often linked to mass surveillance and authoritarian regimes.“
“The debate,” they add, “has been inevitably shaped by developments in China, where the “Communist Party has rolled out a massive, sophisticated network of facial recognition cameras to monitor the country’s population and many MEPs describe the practice as “incompatible with democratic values”
Orwellian Surveillance
Despite this and the fact, that the use of facial recognition technology does not align with the UK’s rapidly diminishing “democratic values” the “expansion of Orwellian facial recognition technology in the UK has continued at an alarming pace” since their first report on face scanning cameras, Face Off The Lawless Growth of Facial Recognition in UK Policing, was published in May 2018, says the BBW.
The report, “sparked a national conversation and “the Metropolitan Police committed to pursue no more than 10 “trial” deployments”, that would be subjected to an independent review, before making a decision as to whether to operationally deploy the technology.” claims the BBW
The resulting independent review was also “damning,” according to BBW, who highlighted again that a huge 81 percent who were in fact, innocent people innocent people have been misidentified and through being flagged by the live facial recognition. Additionally, it was also said to be “highly possible” that the Metropolitan Police’s use of the surveillance technology would be found to be unlawful if it were challenged in court (source).
Surge in police use of facial recognition
Nevertheless, the police have accumulated a substantial facial recognition database containing the faces of “hundreds of thousands” of innocent individuals. The utilisation of retrospective data by law enforcement is heightening the risk of misidentifying more individuals, especially people of colour.
The ongoing failure of the police to comply with the legal requirement to delete the custody images of unconvicted people, means that innocent people could find themselves wrongly labelled as criminal.” says Madeline Stone, adding “We urgently need a democratic, lawful approach to the role of facial biometrics in Britain, and without this, police forces should not be using this Orwellian technology at all,” she said (source).
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