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Abstract: 

The advent of Automated Facial Recognition (AFR) represents a significant intensification of visual surveillance in public spaces, including the capabilities, if needed, to track a person of interest as they move around a city, and to pick a face from a crowd or a queue in a street, square, stadium, or border checkpoint. Precisely because it can entail the mass scanning of law-abiding citizens’ faces without their direct consent in order to find a match with a suspect, “live” AFR seems inherently more invasive of privacy that conventional public space CCTV systems, whatever protocols may be designed-in to manage or discard superfluous images. AFR’s routinized use in China’s urban public spaces, alongside ubiquitous internet and phone surveillance, all managed by AI, has already imbued it with sinister connotations, all the more so as China exports AI and AFR, and an associated “security model,” to 63 other countries, with one company, Huawei, responsible for at least 50 of them. While the pace of deployment in the West is not on the same scale as China, and the purposes currently more limited, government collusion with market-driven developments in liberal democracies pose new challenges, which do need to be faced. This article will outline the institutional milieu in which AFR technology has been developing in Britain under a Conservative government, concentrating on England and Wales.

Keywords: Automated facial recognition (AFR) software; London Metropolitan Police AFR; Police National Database (PNB); Facial Recognition in Privately-Owned Public Spaces

Affiliations:  1: University of Strathclyde.