Facial recognition: a revolution in policing

“To government ministers and police chiefs, it is the biggest investigative breakthrough since DNA screening,” said Mario Ledwith in The Times. “To privacy campaigners, it is ‘turning the country into an open prison’.”

Live facial recognition is already used by eight police forces, who used the technology to scan tens of thousands of faces a day with “ruthless efficiency”, looking for matches to a police hit list of offenders and suspects. Now the Government is looking into expanding its scope.

‘Orwellian’

Under the plans, all 43 police forces in England and Wales would have access to facial recognition. The Home Office would also develop a national face-matching system based not just on images of all offenders in custody, but potentially the passport and driving licence photos of everyone in the UK.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This database could be used to analyse footage of suspects from CCTV, doorbells, dashboard cameras and the like. If that sounds “Orwellian”, it’s because it is, said the Daily Mail. Using facial recognition to keep people safe at large events is proportionate. Having our faces tracked in every town, city and village is truly dystopian.

There would need to be strong safeguards, said The Times. In Luton, for example, faces captured by live recognition that don’t result in a match are immediately deleted. Used responsibly in this way, the technology has clear benefits for police, helping them keep up with “increasingly adept” modern criminals. Over the past two years, the Met has used facial recognition to find more than 100 sex offenders who’d broken their bail conditions – freeing up officers “for the actual job of policing”.

‘Nothing online is ever secure’

It’s true, said Fraser Sampson in The Daily Telegraph: facial recognition really is the biggest policing breakthrough since DNA matching, but there’s one key difference between them. The retention and use of DNA by the police is “very carefully controlled under several acts of Parliament with clear rules, reporting obligations and layers of independent oversight”. The same isn’t true of facial recognition. In fact, right now, the forensic comparison of suspects’ bootprints is better regulated than the use of their faces. That needs to change, and mandatory accountability processes need to be put in place before any wider rollout.

That’s without even considering the risk of hacking, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. As the recent experiences of M&S and Jaguar have taught us, “nothing online is ever secure”. Mark my words, if the state develops a database of every human face in the UK, it’s only a matter of time before that precious data “ends up in the wrong hands”.