Alvi Choudhury, a British software engineer, was wrongly accused of being a criminal by facial recognition. He was arrested in his home in Southampton for a crime committed by someone else in Milton Keynes, a city he never visited.
Separately, Rennea Nelson – a midwife who herself was six months pregnant at the time – was wrongly arrested after a B&M shop in Essex using live facial recognition falsely accused her of shoplifting.
Big Brother Watch, a privacy and civil liberties NGO, have been ringing the alarm about the dangers of facial recognition surveillance for years. ‘These machine learning algorithms are trained on massive data sets of mostly white faces, so it’s going to be better at identifying those.’ said the NGO’s head of investigations, Jake Hurfurt.