DESIGNING OUT CRIME
Test case of facial recognition
In a test case that could have far-reaching implications for retailers’ use of facial recognition technology, Big Brother Watch has launched a landmark legal challenge to the Metropolitan Police Service’s use of real-time FR cameras.
The organisation has joined forces with Parliamentarian Baroness Jenny Jones to urge Home Secretary Sajid Javid and Cressida Dick, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, to stop the police’s use of what it describes as the “dangerously authoritarian” surveillance technology.
The Metropolitan Police Service has targeted the Notting Hill Carnival twice as well as Remembrance Sunday with the “China-style” surveillance cameras, which Big Brother Watch views as a “lawless growth of Orwellian surveillance”.
According to the privacy and civil liberties-focused campaigning organisation, the police have been deploying facial recognition technology with secret watch lists containing not only individuals wanted for arrest, but also protesters, football fans and innocent people with mental health problems.
Big Brother Watch recently took the results of its Freedom of Information campaign to Parliament, revealing that the Metropolitan Police Service’s facial recognition “matches” had wrongly identified innocent people 98% of the time. This led to biometric photographs of over 100 innocent individuals being stored on police service databases without their knowledge.
Despite attracting public controversy and a national campaign based on its stance on this matter, the Metropolitan Police Service has vowed to increase its use of automated facial recognition with no less than seven further deployments planned across the next five months.
Big Brother Watch and Baroness Jones claim that the police lack a legal basis to use the technology and that its use breaches fundamental Human Rights protecting both privacy and freedom of expression.
For her part, Baroness Jones has raised fears that even she could end up on a facial recognition Watch List when conducting her Parliamentary and political duties.
A photograph of her was infamously held on the Metropolitan Police Service’s ‘domestic extremism’ Watch List and her political activities monitored while she sat on an official committee scrutinising the Met and stood to be London’s Mayor.
Anna Dews from the Human Rights team at law firm Leigh Day, who is representing Big Brother Watch and Baroness Jones, stated: “Our clients believe that the police’s use of this technology violates Articles 8, 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. They have written to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and the Home Secretary seeking immediate action. Absent a satisfactory response, they may have no option but to seek the court’s intervention in this matter.”
“The lack of a statutory regime or Code of Practice regulating this technology, the uncertainty as to when and where automated facial recognition can be used, the absence of public information and rights of review and the use of custody images unlawfully held all indicate that the use of automated facial recognition, and the retention of data as a result, is unlawful and must be stopped as a matter of priority.”
