Surveillance Tsar Urges Caution as Home Office Seeks to Expand Facial Recognition Cameras

A van being used by the Metropolitan Police as part of their facial recognition operation in central London, on May 6, 2023. Will Edwards/AFP via Getty Images

The government’s surveillance watchdog has warned that public trust is “critical” after it emerged the Home Office is planning a wider rollout of facial recognition technologies to help police forces and other security agencies identify suspects.

The controversial technology has been trialled in the past few years by South Wales Police and the Metropolitan Police, and the Home Office is now looking for systems suitable for a national rollout.

Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner Fraser Sampson told The Epoch Times on Thursday that while he believes the expansion of new technologies such as facial recognition is “inevitable,” it must be “proportionate and appropriate and accountable.”

The civil liberty group Big Brother Watch has criticized the plan as being “deeply undemocratic,” “dystopian,” and “Orwellian.”

On Wednesday, the Defence and Security Accelerator, which finds and funds innovation for the UK government, announced it is searching for facial recognition technologies that the Home Office can potentially deploy in the next 12 to 18 months.

The shopping list includes live facial recognition systems, which stream CCTV footage in real time to cross check pedestrians’ faces with police databases.

It also includes retrospective facial recognition, which allows the user to upload a photo to find matches, and operator-initiated facial recognition, which enables the operator to take a photo and then use software to identify the person.

The document also specifies that the Home Office is not looking for capabilities beyond identification, such as iris detection, lie detection, or analysis of how someone walks, which are known to be used in China’s mass-surveillance programme.

It also includes an assurance that the use of live systems in policing is “controlled through the College of Policing Authorised Professional Practice (APP) which was published following legal scrutiny of their use,” and that “following this practice ensures that the use of live systems is fair, proportionate, and free from bias.”

An example of CCTV images of a criminal is displayed on a slide during a media event at a Thames Valley Police training facility in Sulhamstead near Reading, England, on Aug. 24, 2023. Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

While facial recognition has resulted in the successful arrests of suspects during trials, the trials have also been mired in controversy and debates around privacy, public consent, and system inaccuracies and bias.

In 2019, Met Police officers trialling live facial recognition fined a man who didn’t want to show his face to the cameras. According to local outlet Romford Recorder, the man covered his face using his jumper but was then stopped by officers who decided he was acting suspiciously.

The Court of Appeal in 2020 ruled that the use of facial recognition in South Wales breached privacy and that the force had not done all it reasonably could to ensure the software it used didn’t have a racial or gender bias.

‘Orwellian Mass Surveillance Tool’

Silkie Carlo, director of civil liberty campaigner Big Brother Watch, said the plan to expand facial recognition is “disturbing and deeply undemocratic.”

She called the technology “an Orwellian mass surveillance tool rarely seen outside of Russia and China,” and said the government has “no mandate at all to do this.”

“And the fact that the rest of the democratic world is legislating to ban live facial recognition surveillance shows just how backwards the Home Office’s approach to this is,” she said in a statement.

Rights campaigner Silkie Carlo (L) demonstrates in front of a mobile police facial recognition facility outside a shopping centre in London, on Feb. 11, 2020. Kelvin Chan/AP Photo

Megan Goulding, a lawyer at Liberty, a campaign group that won the legal challenge against South Wale Police’s facial recognition trial, told Sky News it’s “unacceptable that the government is now looking for new ways to invade our privacy and free expression using facial recognition technology.”

“A court has already ruled once that the use of facial recognition technology breached our fundamental rights. Instead of looking for ways to expand it, the government should be banning its use,” she added.

Public Trust ‘Critical’

Mr. Sampson told The Epoch Times he was “slightly surprised” to find out about the document given his role and the conversations he has had with ministers around the issue.

Commenting on the technology, the surveillance watchdog said he supports the “proportionate and appropriate and accountable use” of facial recognition in some policing under certain circumstances, but the key is treating public trust and confidence as a “critical input” rather than a “desired output.”

The government needs to ensure the public “understand how that technology works, and how it is being deployed” and to put it in the right locations.

Commenting on some research findings that said facial recognition technologies were less accurate in identifying people from certain groups, Mr. Sampson said it’s important to show people that the algorithms “now perform better” and to assure them that where and how the cameras are deployed “don’t increase the likelihood of disproportionate impacts across those same or other groups.”

Asked if there are security risks related to data storage, Mr. Sampson said facial recognition may be less intrusive than conventional information storage because “essentially if it’s not looking for you, it will forget you, it won’t retain copies in the way that you would otherwise have to do with conventional large scale photography and keep them for comparisons.”

But the commissioner stressed it’s “very important” that data are not kept on a cloud system that doesn’t “meet all the necessary security and data management requirements.”