Yep. While we’ve all been busy with the Russell Brand verdict, the horrors in Poland and the debates over slavery, the government has quietly moved a step closer to rolling out facial recognition cameras. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood wants them used at transport hubs and ports, to measure faces against a pre-approved watchlist as immigration officials hunt down overstayers.
As you know, like the Congestion Charge, that’s just how it starts. Live Facial Recognition (LFR) cameras will also be used to find undocumented migrants, so it can resolve their cases and avoid “disruption to the wider public compared to repeated enforcement visits at residential addresses or workplace” the Home Office says.
As is always the case, it is being framed as keeping the public safe. And fair enough. We are already one of the most heavily surveilled countries in the world. But there’s a huge difference between general CCTV and an LFR system that can tell you Jane Smith’s age, address, date of birth and any other data it wants to lay its hands on, as she stands, blissfully unaware, on a railway station platform.
The simple, ordinary act of walking down the street suddenly will become an identity check, without the man or woman being aware. What prevents individuals who are not suspected of any crime from being checked arbitrarily against police watchlists? Worse still, in this era of repeated data breaches, what is to stop any individual misusing the system to track the movements of single women or children? Will sorry be enough?
What about personal data potentially being sold to the highest bidder? Again, as I’m sure you’d agree, there’s a huge difference between watching a public space and systematically identifying the people in it. As this column has repeatedly pointed out, Black people are several times more likely to be racially profiled without tech, let alone with the use of LFR.
Black children are up to eight times more likely to be strip-searched, face higher rates of stop-and-search and experience inflated risk assessments –being judged a higher reoffending risk than they are. Only last year, the Home Office was forced to admit the technology was “more likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its search results”, after testing by the National Physical Laboratory of the way it was used within the Police National Database.
That means it is more likely to incorrectly identify Black and Asian people as suspects than their white counterparts. Tests on the database’s retrospective facial recognition technology found “the false positive identification rate (FPIR) for White subjects (0.04%) is lower than that for Asian subjects (4.0%) and Black subjects (5.5%)”. The number of false positives for Black women was eye-catchingly high.
“The FPIR for Black male subjects (0.4%) is lower than that for Black female subjects (9.9%),” the report said. Time and again, police forces have had to pause LFR cameras for exactly these reasons. We have little if anything in the way of reassurance that the concerns expressed have been properly addressed.
“It is totally inadequate for the Home Office to respond with promises of codes of practice that offer little legal accountability if breached,” said watchdogs Big Brother Watch last week.
Its Senior Advocacy Officer, Jasleen Chaggar, added: “The Home Office claims facial recognition is as powerful as fingerprinting and DNA, yet proposes far weaker legal protections for our biometric data, which is captured constantly as we move about.”
Crucially, the body concluded: “We cannot accept the government’s glacial pace as more innocent people are falsely accused of crimes they did not commit and our freedom to live without constantly identifying ourselves to the state is already being eroded.”
Our privacy should never be a privilege – it should be a fundamental right. Instead, the statistics show that people who look like me need to brace ourselves and brush up on our rights.
