It’s King’s Speech week, with Parliament set to discuss the government’s new plans. For those watching closely, here are Big Brother Watch’s key things to look out for in the debate:
1. Facial Recognition – Lights, Camera, we need Action
After a decade of police forces experimenting on the public with facial recognition tech, the Home Office has finally agreed to our longstanding demand to introduce a law to govern its use.
Big Brother Watch is calling for a law that protects the public from constant facial recognition surveillance and reserves police use to the most serious cases – like in the rest of Europe. If facial recognition becomes a feature of daily life, it will have a devastating effect on privacy, free speech and freedom of assembly.
Live facial recognition technology, which takes a biometric scan of every person’s face as they walk by the camera, undermines the presumption of innocence that is so essential to British freedom. It treats all of us as potential suspects, subjecting us to intrusive identity checks without our agreement.
We’ve been holding back the tide on facial recognition for some time, and we’re currently backing a landmark legal challenge against the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition across London, where millions of innocent people are now scanned every year.
But given that the Home Office has recently announced its intention to “ramp-up facial recognition” in every town, city and village, we know we have a real battle ahead.
This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect the British public from authoritarian mass surveillance – we can’t miss the target.
We hope Parliamentarians will support our recommendations.
2. Social Media Ban – Children’s Well Being and Schools Bill redux
The Bill may have passed, but the question of a ban remains. We expect new rules within months in a rush to act that seems to ignore growing evidence that social media bans do not work.
Big Brother Watch completely opposes an Australia style ban, which in practice is mandatory digital ID by the backdoor.
The sale of 500,000 UK citizens’ biometrics on a Chinese website has understandably shaken public confidence in data security. Age-gating the internet could require the mass storage of children’s and even adults’ data, creating giant honey pots for hackers.
Even if the data could be kept safe, the technological reality of any age-gating means all of our online activity – not just kids – would be monitored like never before. Measures that might be brought in with good intentions today can easily become a snooper’s charter for future governments to monitor and clamp down on those they do not want speaking.
More must be done to protect young people online, but real solutions lie in regulating the harmful practices of tech giants, promoting existing parental tools, and teaching kids digital literacy. You can help make this case via the public consultation.
We hope Parliamentarians will push the Government to change course in favour of solutions that actually work and keep the internet free.
3. Protest rights under attack
The Crime and Policing Bill gives the government some of the most draconian powers to suppress peaceful protests in modern history.
Besides restricting demonstrations around places of worship and imposing a ban on face coverings at protests, the Bill also gives the police the power to shut down protests where they are considered to cause ‘cumulative disruption’. What all these new powers have in common is that they recast protest as a privilege that can be taken away rather than a fundamental democratic right.
Recent deplorable antisemitic attacks at Golders Green have led to calls from high profile figures including Met Police Chief Sir Mark Rowley and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to restrict or ban protests linked to Palestine. But clamping down on the right to free speech will do nothing to keep the Jewish community safe – it will only erode democratic freedoms for everyone.
We will be talking to Parliamentarians to remind them that it is precisely at times like this that defending freedom of speech is even more important.
4. ########## (Encryption)
As of last week, Meta has disabled the option for users to turn on end-to-end encryption on Instagram direct messages. This will allow Meta to read all messages sent by all users, including children.
Instagram generates significant amounts of advertising revenue for Meta, and it’s therefore highly likely that Meta will use its new access to all users’ messages for targeted advertising.
Encryption is one of the best tools by which we can can keep our messages and privacy safe online. By removing the option for users to encrypt their conversations, Meta has indicated that revenue is a higher priority to them than user safety.
Large tech companies like Meta set the standard for the industry, and its choice to move away from user privacy protections therefore likely signals that other platforms might follow suit.
We will be keeping a close watch to see if the Government’s plans include protections for users.