A leading AI research institute has criticised the government for pressing ahead with a mass facial recognition rollout without adequate regulation in place.
The UK has been trialling facial recognition technology for law enforcement for several years, with almost 800,000 people having already had their faces scanned by the Metropolitan Police since 2020.
This summer will see the first permanent facial recognition cameras fitted for a long-term trial in Croydon, south London. According to figures from the Home Office, the government has spent £10m on live facial recognition vehicles for future deployment.
The Home Office has claimed the technology could lead to significant improvements in national security and crime prevention, however the Ada Lovelace Institute warned existing regulations that govern the use of the technology are too fragmented to be fit for purpose.
“The lack of an adequate governance framework for police use of facial recognition – one of its most visible and high-stakes applications – is doubly alarming,” said Michael Birtwistle, associate director at the Ada Lovelace Institute.
“It not only puts the legitimacy of police deployments into question, but also exposes how unprepared our broader regulatory regime is, just as deployment is accelerating and expanding into risk-laden new uses such as ‘emotion recognition’.”
The organisation has urged the government to pass new risk-based legislation to provide clarity on the legality of acceptable uses of technology.
“If we can’t establish proper safeguards for police use of live facial recognition – arguably the best governed use case – then we know people are even less protected from the impacts of private sector surveillance and invasive newer applications that try to predict people’s sensitive internal states,” Birtwistle added.
There has only been one case law on facial recognition in the UK to date, in 2020 when the Court of Appeal ruled in Bridges v South Wales Police that the use of live facial recognition was unlawful. The judgement highlighted “fundamental deficiencies” in the legal framework for the technology.
“There is no specific law providing a clear basis for the use of live facial recognition and other biometric technologies that otherwise pose risks to people and society,” added Nuala Polo, UK public policy lead at the Ada Lovelace Institute.
“Police forces and other organisations claim their deployments are lawful under existing duties, but these claims are almost impossible to assess outside of retrospective court cases. It is not credible to say that there is a sufficient legal framework in place.”
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