Historic UK court rules Police’s use of facial recognition technology was unlawful
Historic UK court rules Police’s use of facial recognition technology was unlawful
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Historic Judgement UK court rules South Wales Police’s use of facial recognition technology, automated facial recognition (AFR) was unlawful.
Facial recognition technology has been implemented on a trial basis in the UK since 2016, both in London by the Met and in South Wales by the SWP.
In South Wales, the AI system is notorious for its error rate.
police in the UK have been testing live, or real-time, facial recognition in public places to try to identify criminals.
In 2018, the SWP was found to have misidentified 2,300 people as potential criminals.
In 2020, it switched to Clearview AI.
Clearview AI combines surveillance footage and images pulled from the internet in an attempt to mass identify individuals in public spaces
Clearview scraped pictures from social media sites, including Facebook, without permission.
In a ruling Tuesday, the UK Court of Appeal said South Wales Police had been using the technology unlawfully, which amounted to a violation of human rights. three senior judges ruled that the South Wales Police had violated Bridges' right to privacy under the European Convention of Human Rights.
They also said that data protection procedures hadn't been properly followed and that not enough had been done to address the potential for the technology to discriminate on the basis of race or sex.
The court also found that the South Wales Police (SWP) had not done enough to satisfy itself that facial recognition technology was not unbiased.
the Court of Appeal agreed that police had violated his right to privacy, as well as data protection and equality laws.
The Appellant, Edward Bridges, who was the claimant in these proceedings, is a civil liberties campaigner who lives in Cardiff. He has been supported by Liberty, the well-known independent civil liberties membership organization.
The case brought by Bridges had originally been dismissed by High Court judges last year, but Bridges challenged this in the Court of Appeal, where his appeal was upheld on three of five grounds.
Mr. Bridges said: "I'm delighted that the court has agreed that facial recognition clearly threatens our rights. "This technology is an intrusive and discriminatory mass surveillance tool. "For three years now, South Wales Police has been using it against hundreds of thousands of us, without our consent and often without our knowledge.
"We should all be able to use our public spaces without being subjected to oppressive surveillance."
Mr. Bridges' face was scanned while he was Christmas shopping in Cardiff in 2017 and at a peaceful anti-arms protest outside the city's Motorpoint Arena in 2018.
He had argued it breached his human rights when his biometric data was analyzed without his knowledge or consent.
"The Court has agreed that this dystopian surveillance tool violates our rights and threatens our liberties," Megan Goulding, a lawyer for civil rights group Liberty, which represented Bridges, said in a statement. "It is time for the Government to recognize the serious dangers of this intrusive technology. Facial recognition is a threat to our freedom – it needs to be banned."
Reality views –
All over the world people need to demand ban on current or future use of any automated facial recognition technology, it should happen only with prior permission of High Courts, when police want to arrest terrorist and locate them.
what we need is public should start to install high quality 4k Web cameras in bungalows, malls, shops, Banks etc. This way if police need data in case of crime, property owner can give them.
Today automated facial recognition (AFR) is not perfect but the day is not far when AFR will be 101% accurate. And that will start indirectly a new kind of global slavery.
All over world People need to demand 100% permanent ban on use of automated facial recognition (AFR) by Police department or any government organization.
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Reality views by sm
Tags – UK AFR automated facial recognition Ban Liberty Unlawful
