Legal battle to outlaw police’s controversial face-spotting cameras
CONTROVERSIAL facial recognition cameras being brought in by Britain’s biggest police force face being shut down by legal challenges from civil liberties groups.
The Metropolitan Police announced on Friday it will deploy the cameras in London within weeks, with images compared against a database of known criminals, helping the force to catch suspects, according to Scotland Yard.
But campaigners claim the scheme will breach privacy and ‘pave the way for a surveillance state’ and are set to go to court to close it down.
Fears over the misuse of facialrecognition technology were raised by BBC1’s hit thriller last year The Capture, starring Holliday Grainger and Callum Turner.
Big Brother Watch launched a crowd-funded High Court action against a Met Police pilot scheme for the technology in 2018. The action was paused because the force said it had yet to make a decision on the use of the technology.
And in July, an independent review commissioned by the Met found that in trials just 19 per cent of matches were accurate with ‘absolute confidence’. However, the force has forged ahead with the system, claiming it now has 70 per cent accuracy, though i ndependent experts have questioned this.
Big Brother Watch claims the technology breaches the public’s privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights. The campaign group’s director Silkie Carlo, said yesterday: ‘ The Met were going to make a decision when they had the results of their independent review, but clearly they didn’t like the results of the review.
‘We’re urgently considering our options for the most robust action we can take. We will continue to challenge it until we can win.’
And Hannah Couchman, of civilrights group Liberty, warned: ‘This move by the Met paves the way for a surveillance state.’
Data protection watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office yesterday said it was concerned the legal framework was not in place for the technology’s roll-out across the country.
Met Assistant Commissioner Nick Ephgrave said the force believed that a High Court ruling in September allowing the use of the technology by South Wales Police provided the legal basis for the Met’s roll-out of facial recognition kits costing £200,000.
But Ed Bridges, a former Lib Dem councillor from Cardiff, has claimed his image was captured unlawfully by South Wales police when he went out to buy a lunchtime sandwich. The High Court ruled against him and the case is now subject to an appeal.
Mr Ephgrave added that the technology was a ‘fantastic crimefighting tool’ that would allow the force to ‘bear down on violent and serious offenders’.
HERE’S an i dea. Why don’t we all save time and declare ourselves guilty at the age of 18 and sign a State Culpability document. Such is my r esponse to t he deeply worrying news that the Metropolitan Police is adding facial recognition cameras to its already plentiful armoury of surveillance weaponry.
Linked to databases on criminal suspects, the cameras will scan the features of people on the streets of London and alert officers if a suspect’s face appears. The Met claims any images of individuals not on their system will be ‘deleted in seconds’. How reassuring.
But during two years of trials, the system has been only 70 per cent effective at spotting suspects. No wonder the scheme – similar to one already used in South Wales – has been condemned as a ‘ breathtaking assault on rights’. Of course, at a time of record numbers of knife attacks, there will be many who cleave to the ‘if you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve nothing to worry about’ school of thought.
But the problem with any kind of official surveillance is mission creep. We’re used to CCTV cameras – in London there are estimated to be 500,000 – but facial recognition cameras smack of authoritarian governments.
In China, such technology is used alongside an insidious system of judging people’s credit rating not just by how much they earn, spend and save but how they behave and with whom they associate.
But we’re not China, you exclaim! True – but governments change. And it is an axiom of life that politicians very rarely row back on any instruments of power they’ve given themselves. Insurance companies will also be eager to exploit this development. Employers would find it handy for recruitment vetting.
No one voted or asked for this but I can see countless companies joining in this most unBritish f acial recognition bonanza. Away from the issue of whether we’re comfortable to be a society where cameras help anyone in a position of authority to identify us without our knowledge as we go about our daily lives, there is another disturbing aspect.
Research has shown that one in ten women h a s b e e n v o y e u r i s t i c a l l y surveilled by those monitoring CCTV cameras. Police officers have used such technology to track estranged spouses, ‘help’ their friends in various ways, and so on.
Most worrying, though, is what happens when everything is accessible to the authorities. What i f your aunt attended an anti-Brexit rally, you live next door to a convicted drink-driver or last went on holiday to Moscow – and are thus tainted by association?
This isn’t scaremongering. The technology to eradicate our privacy already exists – but the laws, checks and balances (among which I include the lack of public awareness of its implications) sadly do not.
Big Brother won’t just be watching us, he’ll be reading our text messages, denying us insurance and selling every detail of our lives to anyone who’s paid their access fee.
Get ready to sign your guilty papers. Soon you won’t have a choice.