Facial Recognition

What’s happening?

Police forces in the UK have used facial recognition in one form or another since 2015. And despite Liberty client Ed Bridges winning the world’s first legal challenge to police use of the technology in 2020, every force in the country is now using it.

Some are using what’s called ‘live facial recognition’. This usually involves parking vans equipped with the tech on busy shopping streets or outside stadiums and train stations, scanning the hundreds of thousands of us who come within range of the police cameras on the vehicles’ roofs, attempting to match our faces in real time to images on secretive watchlists.

But some forces – including South Wales Police, the force which lost the Bridges case – are going even further. South Wales has tested setting up networks of facial recognition cameras across Cardiff for specific events like the Six Nations rugby. This massively expands the facial recognition area when the tech is used and leads to thousands more people being scanned.

And even more worrying, London’s Metropolitan Police has announced it will be installing the UK’s first permanent facial recognition cameras in Croydon – scanning tens of thousands of people every single day.

South Wales Police has also been trialling facial recognition technology on officers’ phones, enabling them to scan and potentially instantly identify anyone they come into contact with. This is known as ‘operator-initiated facial recognition’ and is expected to now spread to more police forces.

Other forces have software allowing the police to identify everyone in any pictures and footage they can get their hands on – from CCTV cameras to what we post on our social media accounts. This is called ‘retroactive facial recognition’, because the images and videos already exist, rather than using face-scanning cameras in real time like ‘live facial recognition’ does.

HOW DOES FACIAL RECOGNITION WORK?

Facial recognition works by matching the faces of people within range of special cameras (in the case of ‘live’ and ‘operator-initiated’ facial recognition) or which appear in pictures and video footage (in the case of ‘retroactive’ facial recognition) to images of people on a watchlist.

It does this by ‘mapping’ the distinct points of our faces and allocating a numbered code to that map. It then compares that code to the codes assigned to faces on the watchlist.

In Ed Bridges’ case against South Wales police, documents given to the court showed that the watchlists can contain pictures of anyone, including people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing, and the images used can come from anywhere – even from our social media accounts.

Why should we be concerned?

In Ed Bridges’ case, the Court said South Wales Police’s use of live facial recognition violated privacy rights and broke data protection and equality laws. This was partly due to the level of discretion officers had when choosing where to use the tech.

But despite Ed’s victory, the Government and police have forged ahead, infecting every aspect of our lives with facial recognition that can be used to ID and track any one of us.

It’s been used at the football, the rugby and Formula 1, at music festivals, and even at the seaside. It’s been used as a tool of intimidation at protests. And it’s being used in shops with information passed to the police to track down people forced to shoplift during a cost-of-living crisis.

And there simply isn’t any telling how and when police are using retroactive facial recognition to identify countless people in any image or footage they hold.

Liberty Investigates and i news discovered that Metropolitan Police computers in London had accessed a search engine tool called Pimeyes thousands of times. Pimeyes allows users to upload photos and identify where images of an individual appear elsewhere on the internet.

Liberty Investigates and the Telegraph also revealed that police forces have run hundreds of facial recognition searches against the passport database which contains the images of 46 million people.

Facial recognition changes what it means to simply live our lives.

We want to be able to see our favourite music artists on tour, go to the football, take road trips, and make memories with our loved ones safely without being monitored.

But they want the ability to watch anyone they choose, wherever we go.

After years of high-profile scandals involving violent, racist and sexist police forces in the UK, trust in officers is at an all-time low. Facial recognition that can ID and track down all of us is dangerous tech – and it’s being used by dangerous people without any safeguards.

And history tells us that surveillance tech will always be disproportionately used again communities of colour. While facial recognition is known to misidentify Black people – meaning if you are black you are more likely to be stopped, questioned and searched by police. The Metropolitan Police has often used it in ethnically diverse areas and at events likely to be highly attended by people of colour, including Notting Hill Carnival for two years running.

What are we calling for?

There are simply no rules or laws governing police use of facial recognition in the UK – it’s a regulatory Wild West.

Other countries are putting laws in place to limit the dangerous effects of this technology. We need to see urgent action from the Government to introduce safeguards to limit how the police can use facial recognition, and to protect all of us from abuse of power as we go about our daily lives.

Liberty maintains that police should be banned from using facial recognition technology on the public. But at the very least, we need laws to ensure:

• facial recognition is not used without independent sign-off from a judge
• no one is added to a police watchlist unless they are reasonably suspected of a serious crime
• facial recognition is never used to identify journalists and their sources, whistleblowers, protesters, and anyone in or around polling stations.