Business Insider — 71% of facial recognition misidentifications resulted in police stopping + IDing innocent people

At the Met’s facial recognition deployment on Oxford Circus last Thursday:

• 7 innocent members of the public misidentified + their photos put on police database for 1m
• 5 of whom were ALSO questioned + ID’d
• 8,600 people scanned for facial ID check w/o consent
• 7,292 people were on the police’s “targeted” facial recognition watch list
• 86% of the facial recognition alerts wrongly flagged innocent members of the public as wanted
• 71% of facial recognition misidentifications resulted in police stopping + IDing innocent people

This blows apart the Met’s defence that facial recognition surveillance is in any way proportionate or that the staggering inaccuracy is mitigated by human checks.

This is a disaster for human rights, a breach of our most basic liberties & an embarrassment for our capital city.

Source

Business Insider — British police scanned 8,600 people’s faces in London without their consent, resulting in just 1 arrest and 7 false positives

The Independent — Facial recognition technology scans 13,200 people in London but results in just one arrest

The Verge — London’s Metropolitan Police scanned 8,600 people’s faces without their consent last week

The Register — If you’re wondering how Brit cops’ live suspect-hunting facial-recog is going, it’s cruising at 88% false positives

The Telegraph — What constant surveillance does to your brain and behaviour

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