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The Home Office is seeking views on the development of a new legal framework for the use of live facial recognition technology that balances public harm with individual rights and keeps pace with technological developments.
Launching the consultation exercise, the Crime and Policing Minister, Sarah Jones MP said that facial recognition is the “biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching.”
More and more police forces are trialing live facial recognition technology (LFR) with South Wales, Essex and the Met pioneers in this space. A recent injection of cash from the Home Office allowed forces from Manchester, Bedfordshire, West Yorkshire, Surrey and Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire to begin rolling out the tech in recent weeks.
This new 10-week consultation seeks to deal with what the government calls a ‘patchwork’ of laws that are used to underpin the use of facial recognition technology and also introduce a new oversight body. It wants to set out the rules for the overt use of facial recognition by law enforcement organisations.
“We have concluded that although there is a legal framework for police use of facial recognition, it does not give the police sufficient confidence to use it at significantly greater scale. Nor does it consistently give the public the confidence that it will be used responsibly according to clear rules. This is because the current framework is complicated and difficult to understand.”
The consultation looks at LFR along with retrospective facial recognition and officer initiated recognition technologies. The 17 questions in the consultation include when these technologies should be used, who should use them and the sign off processes that should be in place. It also covers how the new framework should guard against bias and discrimination.
As well as launching the consultation process, the Home Office also published the results of a survey it carried out to on public attitudes to the use of facial recognition technologies. Just under 3,000 people completed the survey that took place in January this year. It showed that two thirds of respondents support police use of facial recognition technology, with 11% opposing its use and 23% neither agreeing or disagreeing.
The Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner Professor William Webster welcomed the consultation, stressing the need for meaningful oversight and a framework that: “is sufficiently agile to provide the public with confidence that the right balance of regulatory oversight has been achieved in a fast moving area with innovation and new technologies emerging at pace.”
Silkie Carlo, Director of Big Brother Watch which campaigns against the use of LFR said: “Police have been using facial recognition technology absent a democratic or legal basis for a decade” and that the consultation is necessary and long overdue. She called on the government to immediately stop the police’s use of LFR pending the outcome of the consultation.
The consultation document, Legal framework for using facial recognition in law enforcement, is available now and open for responses until 12 February.
Watch the recent Emergency Services Times webinar on LFR on catch up here:
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