In response to a new report by the National Physical Laboratory on the use of facial recognition technology by police forces, Big Brother Watch’s legal and policy officer, Madeleine Stone said:
“Live facial recognition is suspicionless mass surveillance that turns us into walking ID cards, subjecting innocent people to biometric police identity checks. This Orwellian technology may be used in China and Russia but has no place in British policing.
“This report confirms that live facial recognition does have significant race and sex biases, but says that police can use settings to mitigate them. Given repeated findings of institutional racism and sexism within the police, forces should not be using such discriminatory technology at all. Police forces have also refused to disclose the ethnicity breakdowns of watchlists, but at facial recognition deployments, we have repeatedly witnessed black men, even black children, being wrongly matched and stopped.
“1 in 6,000 people being wrongly flagged by facial recognition is nothing to boast about, particularly at deployments in large cities where tens of thousands of people are scanned per day. If rolled out across the UK, this could mean tens of thousands of us will be wrongly flagged as criminals and forced to prove our innocence.
“Live facial recognition is not referenced in a single UK law, has never been debated in parliament, and is one of the most privacy-intrusive tools ever used in British policing. Parliament should urgently stop police from using this dangerously authoritarian surveillance tech.”