Privacy campaigners' alarm over proliferation of facial-recognition technology
Posted by Phillip Dolby on 19th August 2019
IT’S like something from the Orwellian dystopian novel ‘1984’.
But corporate mass surveillance - without the knowledge of the public - is exactly what’s been happening at several public locations around the UK in recent years, raising the concerns of privacy campaigners.
The Financial Times reports private companies - in partnership with the police - have been spearheading facial recognition technologies in places such as King’s Cross, London; Meadowhall shopping centre, Sheffield; and the Trafford Centre, Manchester.
Pilot projects have also been carried out at Liverpool’s World Museum and at Birmingham’s Millennium Point conference centre.
An investigation by Big Brother Watch, a group which tracks the use of surveillance, has found that millions of people have been recorded by cameras and the data stored by the companies and the police, who say the project has been used “in the interests of public safety.”
However, privacy campaigners have raised questions over the legality of the move, saying the recording of people’s faces on cameras and monitoring who goes where -and when - contravenes individuals’ human right to privacy.
Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo said: “The collusion between police and private companies in building these surveillance nets around public spaces is deeply disturbing.
“Facial recognition is the perfect tool of oppression and the widespread use we’ve found indicates we’re facing a privacy emergency.”
Hannah Couchman, policy and campaigns officer at human rights group Liberty echoed the comments.
She said: “Experts, civil society and MPs from across the political spectrum are alarmed at how the technology is spreading.
“It’s time for the Home Office to acknowledge these serious risks, abandon its bid to promote this dangerous technology and roll back police use of facial recognition.”
Those supporting the use of the technology have suggested facial recognition can help track lost individuals and also help the police find those who have committed crime.
As far as I’m concerned, I don’t like the idea of my whereabouts being unnecessarily monitored by a technocratic police state.
It’s one thing trying to locate terrorists, and quite another for algorithms to be created to predict when I might call at Mark & Spencers to buy some new boxer shorts.
You might be unsurprised to hear of this happening in communist China - where the state controls just about every aspect of every day life - but not here in the UK.
We’re living in a free, democratic society, aren’t we? Perhaps we should keep it that way.
