Ban Government Use of Face Recognition In the UK

In 2015, Leicestershire Police scanned the faces of 90,000 individuals at a music festival in the UK and checked these images against a database of people suspected of crimes across Europe. This was the first known deployment of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) at an outdoor public event in the UK. In the years since, the surveillance technology has been frequently used throughout the country with little government oversight and no electoral mandate. 

Face recognition presents an inherent threat to individual privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice. It has an egregious history of misidentifying people of color, leading for example to wrongful arrest, as well as failing to correctly identify trans and nonbinary people. Of course, even if overnight the technology somehow had 100% accuracy, it would still be an unacceptable tool of invasive surveillance capable of identifying and tracking people on a massive scale. 

EFF has spent the last few years advocating for a ban on government use of face recognition in the U.S.–and we’ve watched and helped as many municipalities have, including in our own backyard–but we’ve seen enough of its use in the UK as well. 

That’s why we are calling for a ban on government use of face recognition in the UK. We are not alone. London-based civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has been driving the fight to end government-use of face recognition across the country. Human rights organization Liberty brought the first judicial challenge against police use of live facial recognition, on the grounds that it breached the Human Rights Act 1998. The government’s own privacy regulator raised concerns about the technical bias of LFR technology, the use of watchlist images with uncertain provenance, and ways that the deployment of LFR evades compliance with data protection principles. And the first independent report commissioned by Scotland Yard challenged police use of LFR as lacking an explicit basis and found the technology 81% inaccurate. The independent Ryder Review also recommended the suspension of LFR in public places until further regulations are introduced.

What Is the UK’s Current Policy on Face Recognition? 

Make no mistake: Police forces across the UK, like police in the US, are using live face recognition. That means full-on Minority Report-style real-time attempts to match people’s faces as they walk on the street to databases of photographs, including suspect photos. 

Of the five forces that have used the technology in England and Wales, the silent rollout has been primarily driven by London’s Metropolitan Police (better known as the Met) and South Wales Police, which oversees the over-1-million-person metro area of Cardiff. The technology is often supplied by Japanese tech company NEC Corporat