Big Brother Watch has started a letter campaign calling for the UK police and companies to stop the use of live facial recognition for public surveillance.
The privacy campaign group wrote a letter, signed by over 18 UK politicians, including David Davis, Diane Abbott, Jo Swinson and Caroline Lucas, and 25 campaign groups, including Amnesty International and Liberty, arguing that live facial recognition surveillance is inaccurate, intrusive and violates an individual's right to privacy.
The technology enables the user to check in real time faces captured on CCTV against watch lists largely collected by the police. The UK Home Office expressed its support for the police "as they trial new technologies to protect the public, including facial recognition, which helps them identify and locate suspects and criminals."
Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo said "What we're doing is putting this to government to say: 'Please can we open this debate and have this conversation. 'But for goodness sake, while it is going on, there is now a surveillance crisis on our hands that needs to be stopped urgently'."
Areeq Chowdhury, head of the Future Advocacy think tank, pointed out that these systems are more likely to misidentify women and darker-skinned people due to things like color contrasts on people of color and systems being confused by cosmetics. He added that some systems may not have enough training for diverse datasets of people from different demographics.
However, Zak Doffman, CEO of Digital Barriers, emphasized that facial recognition is an essential tool for counter-terrorism but said that he did not support indiscriminate use of the technology.
Tony Porter, the UK Surveillance Camera Commissioner, said "There should be a standard around its siting, efficiency and effectiveness. I suppose you might say, 'What is an appropriate force hit-rate that is tolerable against the totality?' There needs to be a lot more assurance to the public that any notion of bias through ethnic background is eradicated."
