Police to be given right to use photos from driving license and maybe passport for facial recognition

[cakeorwine]

Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders | Facial recognition | The Guardian

Interesting.
The Government has pictures of our faces for passports and driving licenses. A clause in a new criminal justice bill will allow the police to have access to these pictures for matching against facial recognition. Pick an image up with a camera and the police will be able to use these pictures to identify the person.

Assuming the facial recognition technology can be trusted.

OTOH - it's useful for catching suspects.

But OTOH, how many people will end up on a database and watch list for taking part in protests, demonstrations - and who knows where that will end.

Facial recognition is being used to scan crowds for people the police are after.

The EU had proposed similar but dropped it due it being a disproportionate breach of privacy.

I suspect that I might end up on a database because of some of my political views. Probably on it already. Heck, they probably already have my picture from the DVLA anyway.

But do we really give our photos to the Government so they can be used to catch criminals?

No, what's more likely to happen is a non-criminal black person would be mis-identified as a criminal black person in the machine learning equivalent of "all black people look the same"

It wouldn't be "lighter skin toned" people being discriminated against

⬆️Exactly.

All part of the same thing.

Much easier to arrest someone if you have been able to easily identify them.

And you don’t even have to arrest them. Facial recognition could be used to punish in other ways. Eg, if you were at a protest you could have your ability to access public transport blocked.

It’s extremely concerning.

Just in case.......

Sorry, you can't come in here. Just in case.

@cakeorwine no they aren’t. Politics and this technology are interlinked, but they are very different species. It is a good thing to be able to arrest someone if they are easy to identify, that is not the problem to be addressed. Nor the point of your original post.

Again, it is not the technology you should be worried about, it is already in place and has been for decades, you are never ever going to put that genie back in the bottle. it would be like attempting to rid the world of nuclear technology in all its guises.

Place the emphasis on what can be done, and that is appropriate and robust checks, balances, oversight and regulation. Also campaign for everyone, no matter what side of the law they may be on, no matter what financial situation they have, to be able to access the legal systems equally.

Information is the key to prevention of harm to society and as both a means of prosecution and defence.

if you want to change the laws - get into politics.

The people who say, "I don't mind because I've got nothing to hide."

Probably those who say "I don't care about freedom of speech and thought because I don't think and have fuck all to say."

It is not a good thing to be able to easily identify someone at a protest or a demonstration simply by using their photo ID from a driving license.

It is linked together - all part of the surveillance society that we live in. And I have no doubt there is more that we don't know about.

You seem well informed on this subject.

"Information is the key to prevention of harm to society and as both a means of prosecution and defence."

That sounds like a slippery slope to a proper surveillance society.

Does the prevention of harm outweigh our civil liberties ?

Yes I am well informed. That’s not a bad thing to be. Information gathering in various forms has been around since life began. To think otherwise is incredibly blinkered. Information is everything.
Your civil liberties are not being hampered by anyone gathering information.

Again, your thinking around being arrested at a protest is wrong. What you need to change is the law which severely restricts our right to protest. The LAW not the technology. Change the law by getting into politics are make a difference. It is law that’s needs scrutinising and safeguarding not technology. Technology is just a tool that the law uses.

If you want the technology to be banned (which will be impossible to do now) think very, very, very, carefully about exactly what that world would look like and just how many civil liberties and the way people can exercise them today and take for granted and as a right to have - they will be gone.

Which goes to the point I made earlier. The tech is much more reliably able to answer the question “is this fingerprint/face one of a small number allowed to open this phone”. It becomes much less reliable (and therefore prone to incorrect results) the larger the database of possible candidates is.

Almost everyone trotting out the trite “nothing to hide” line seems to imagine that the tech is 100% reliable 100% of the time, and it isn’t.

If people insist on treating this tech as if it was, say modern day DNA evidence*, there will be miscarriages of justice.

*there have been cases of mistaken identity using DNA evidence when it was in it’s infancy.

@Fieldofbrokenpromises which is why it needs oversight, checks and balances and be freely held up to scrutiny any data it gives/finds. Nothing is ever perfect.
This technology is already out there and being used, all the criminal justice act is doing is allowing police slightly quicker access than they currently already have to do what enforcement and other agencies have already been doing for decades. It’s nothing new, just a little faster to get the same result.