A poison for democracy

From an editorial in the Guardian:

The pressure group Liberty has denounced automatic facial recognition as “arsenic in the water supply of democracy.” It has the potential to abolish privacy in public places.

In a country like Britain, which already has the highest density of CCTV cameras in the western world, it could mean that there was nowhere in any city anyone could walk with their face uncovered without being potentially visible to the police.

One of the arguments against the police’s deployment of the technology is that it doesn’t yet work very well. It is especially inaccurate and prone to bias when used against people of colour: a recent test of Amazon’s facial recognition software by the American Civil Liberties Union found that it falsely identified 28 members of Congress as criminals.

Inaccuracy may not long be the most pressing problem. The technology is improving all the time and millions of people help to make it better. Once the technology is overwhelmingly reliable, the dystopian world of government surveillance foreseen by Liberty will become a reality. But it is not just governments who will be interested in the results. Once our faces are attached to the detailed digital identities that are already compiled by the advertising industry, any sufficiently sophisticated shopping mall will have a map of the preferences of everyone who enters its maw. It may be too late to stop the collection of this data. But the law must ensure that it is not stored and refined in ways that will harm the innocent and slowly poison our public life.