Big Brother: now watching you in real time

Mass public surveillance is something we associate with authoritarian regimes, said The Times. Beijing makes extensive use of facial recognition technology to monitor its people, notably the Uighur Muslims. But “outside the alternative reality of a Jason Bourne film, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen in the freedom-loving West, where civil liberties are highly valued.” Yet civil liberties groups are warning that the use of facial recognition technologies has reached “epidemic” proportions here in the UK. According to a report by Big Brother Watch, “many millions of innocent people” have had their faces scanned in shopping centres, museums and other privately owned spaces around the country. These include 67 acres of regenerated land around King’s Cross station – which is home to shops and cafés, as well as Central St Martins art college. The zone’s developer, Argent, says it’s trying to ensure “public safety” – but it has not revealed what, exactly, it is using the technology for.

We can have a good guess, said Stephanie Hare in The Guardian. Argent and other companies may be scanning faces to match them against police watch-lists, or to compile their own watch-lists. They may also be passing data to third parties. Police chiefs in Britain seek to reassure us by saying that they already use biometric data such as DNA and fingerprints, and that this new form could enable real-time identification of suspected terrorists and help find missing people. Maybe so. But DNA samples or fingerprints are laborious to gather, and there are rules limiting their use and how long police can keep them. Facial recognition data is subject to far fewer constraints. If you think your face might wrongly be held in a police database, you have to request that it be deleted. What’s more, the technology is alarmingly unreliable, struggling to correctly identify dark-skinned people, women and children – leaving huge numbers at risk of being misidentified as suspects, and having to prove their innocence.

Still, as the technology grows more sophisticated it’ll get more accurate, said The Daily Telegraph. And it could have a range of highly positive uses. In the US it’s already used at summer camps, so parents can be sent pictures of their children at play. It could also be used to help combat fraud and keep hospitals safe from intruders. The technology is bound to become more pervasive, said The Independent – but that will create more opportunities for snooping and blackmail. Too often, the law has failed to keep up with digital innovation, and has struggled to regulate it retrospectively. This time, we must get robust guidelines in place before it’s too late.