First legal challenge over police’s facial recognition cameras
FACIAL recognition surveillance by police breaches human rights laws, a court heard yesterday.
An office worker has begun the first legal challenge against a police force after his face was captured using the technology.
Ed Bridges, from Cardiff, claims he was scanned while Christmas shopping in 2017 and then again during a peaceful protest against the arms trade last year.
The 36-year-old described it as ‘a fundamental invasion of my privacy’, adding that the experience had left him ‘distressed.’
Facial recognition technology works by scanning faces in a crowd using cameras and then measuring the distance between facial features. This creates a numerical code which is then compared with a ‘watch list’ of images, including suspected terrorists, murderers and missing people.
The technology has been used in public spaces by three police forces in England and Wales since 2015: the Metropolitan Police, Leicestershire Police and South Wales Police.
Last week San Francisco, the world’s technology capital, became the first US city to ban the use of facial recognition software after fears were raised about its reliability and effects on liberty and privacy.
Yesterday Dan Squires QC, representing Mr Bridges, said automated facial recognition, or AFR, enabled police to ‘ monitor people’s activity in public in a way they have never been able to do before’.
He told the Administrative Court in Cardiff: ‘ The reason AFR represents such a step change is you are able to capture almost instantaneously the biometric data of thousands of people. It has profound consequences for privacy and data protection rights, and the legal framework which currently applies to the use of AFR by the police does not ensure those rights are sufficiently protected.’
He said Mr Bridges had ‘a reasonable expectation’ that his face would not be scanned in a public space and processed without his consent while he was not suspected of wrongdoing. As a result, the police had violated Article 8 of the Human
‘Invasion of privacy’
Rights Act – respect for privacy – as well as the Data Protection Act, he added.
The court heard South Wales Police had deployed the technology on at least 40 occasions since the start of a pilot two years ago, including at the 2017 Champions League football final in Cardiff.
The force argues that its use of AFR does not infringe the privacy or data protection rights of Mr Bridges as it is used in the same way as photographing someone’s activities in public.
The court was told that when someone’s face is scanned and they are not identified on a watch list, their images and biometric data are immediately destroyed. The case, due to last three days, continues.