Privacy groups report a surge in UK police facial recognition scans of databases secretly stocked with passport photos lacking parliamentary oversight.
Big Brother Watch says the UK government has allowed images from the country’s passport and immigration databases to be made available to facial recognition systems, without informing the public or parliament.
The group claims the passport database contains around 58 million headshots of Brits, plus a further 92 million made available from sources such as the immigration database, visa applications, and more.
By way of comparison, the Police National Database contains circa 20 million photos of those who have been arrested by, or are at least of interest to, the police.
In a joint statement, Big Brother Watch, its director Silkie Carlo, Privacy International, and its senior technologist Nuno Guerreiro de Sousa, described the databases and lack of transparency as “Orwellian.” They have also written to both the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police, calling for a ban on the practice.
The comments come after Big Brother Watch submitted Freedom of Information requests, which revealed a significant uptick in police scanning the databases in question as part of the force’s increasing facial recognition use.
The number of searches by 31 police forces against the passport databases rose from two in 2020 to 417 by 2023, and scans using the immigration database photos rose from 16 in 2023 to 102 the following year.
Carlo said: “This astonishing revelation shows both our privacy and democracy are at risk from secretive AI policing, and that members of the public are now subject to the inevitable risk of misidentifications and injustice. Police officers can secretly take photos from protests, social media, or indeed anywhere and seek to identify members of the public without suspecting us of having committed any crime.
“This is a historic breach of the right to privacy in Britain that must end. We’ve taken this legal action to defend the rights of tens of millions of innocent people in Britain.”
[…]
Recent data from the Met attempted to imbue a sense of confidence in facial recognition, as the number of arrests the technology facilitated passed the 1,000 mark, the force said in July.
However, privacy campaigners were quick to point out that this accounted for just 0.15 percent of the total arrests in London since 2020. They suggested that despite the shiny 1,000 number, this did not represent a valuable return on investment in the tech.
Alas, the UK has not given up on its pursuit of greater surveillance powers. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, is a big fan of FR, having said last year that it was the answer to preventing future riots like the ones that broke out across the UK last year following the Southport murders. ®
Source: UK passport database images used in facial recognition scans • The Register
Robin Edgar
Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft