Guilty until proven innocent is NEVER the right way to start out. LFR needs PROPER regulation before it gets too pervasive (or is it already too late?)

Guilty until proven innocent is ALWAYS the right way to start out - if the person who is guilty is a member of the public.

Of course, if the shoe is on the other foot and the accused is, say, a member of parliament or a prominent member of the public - then of course they should always be treated as innocent until inevitably proven guilty.

Do not forget your role in this game. You mean fuck all. Unless, of course, you're on the other side.

No no no, I'm not guilty. I cannot sweat.

"Sarah Jones, crime and policing minister, said facial recognition technology "is the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching.""

Maybe if you are looking for criminals who committed crime X but that's not the same as routinely tracking the movement of journos or opposition politicians or people protesting and that data is being (illegally) stored ...

I'm in two minds about this.

Although facial recognition systems can scan many more faces than a human looking at stills from surveillance cameras, it is really only different in scale from a policeman saying "I know that face, let's see what they're doing". Both can easily lead to mis-identification.

But the devil is in the detail. One hopes that the facial recognition systems will discard any reference to someone who is not of interest to the police, so that although it may have spotted and identified someone, as long as they are not wanted, the picture and any identity information is completely expunged from the system immediately, or at least after a very short period of time.

The danger is that such information could be worth a lot to try and spot people who appear uninteresting, but who could be inferred to be of more interest if they are spotted repeatedly in scenarios that the police are monitoring. So, someone otherwise not on the radar who is spotted at certain types of protest could suddenly become someone they want to identify and track.

Again, no different in principal from mk 1 eyeballs spotting people on surveillance video, just a whole lot more efficient. In the past, although you know that your image might be captured (and indeed kept for quite some time), you could be pretty certain that nobody would be bothered to go through and identify everyone in the data. But those days are now gone.

I can see the logic for law enforcement organisations wanting to do identify everyone , and this is an area where good quality legislation is really needed and enforced, but there will always be a "but it would be sooooo useful to track everybody" mentality from people trying to uphold public safety. There needs to be acceptable guardrails.

In this case, the real problem is that the person bringing the case has been asked to identify themselves to show that they are not the person that the police wanted, when they were mis-identified on a surveillance system. In theory, this is a quite reasonable request, but it will offend many totally innocent people. We do have legislation on the books that allow police to ask for a means of identifying yourself in public, although it's not expected to be done at any scale, but they can actually detain you until you do, especially in proximity to a crime scene. This problem could be offset by always carried mandatory ID cards, but that's a whole different can or worms!

One hopes that the facial recognition systems will discard any reference to someone who is not of interest to the police

Think again. PC Plod retains every DNA sample they gather, just in case. Even if those samples came from people who hadn't committed a crime or were found not guilty in court. They'll do this for Snoopercam data.

Besides, everyone is of interest to the police these days.

Plod is meant to delete that sample if someone is not charged.

Meant to and do are two totally different things. Do you think if there is an unsolved murder, for which people have been hauled in but not charged, the police are going to destroy DNA taken from suspects?

We do have legislation on the books that allow police to ask for a means of identifying yourself in public

Only for specific circumstances; someone driving a vehicle and for suspected terrorism offences. Outside of that the police can stop you, and even search you - looking only for specific items ("going equipped") such as those used for burglary - but they cannot demand you identify yourself, look for identification (by checking your wallet for instance), nor have a right to know where you've been or where you're going.

Although facial recognition systems can scan many more faces than a human looking at stills from surveillance cameras, it is really only different in scale from a policeman saying "I know that face, let's see what they're doing". Both can easily lead to mis-identification.

But the devil is in the detail. One hopes that the facial recognition systems will discard any reference to someone who is not of interest to the police, so that although it may have spotted and identified someone, as long as they are not wanted, the picture and any identity information is completely expunged from the system immediately, or at least after a very short period of time.

...

Again, no different in principal from mk 1 eyeballs spotting people on surveillance video

The first paragraph is quasi-reasonable. The problem is that what you talk about in the second paragraph does not happen. They keep everything they have. Even though they've been told they can't retain fingerprint and DNA records indefinitely for people who have been eliminated/wrongly arrested, they don't actually do it unless you personally sue them and have the court tell them to bloody well do it. This is completely different from the Mk1 eyeball, because a Police officer scanning a crowd will not remember the faces of every unremarkable person that comes past, but LFR does. They may spot a "repeat customer" and follow them (which, in the absence of actual wrongdoing or other reaosnable cause is actually wrong, and potentially harassment - albeit probably also fair enough). But LFR remembers everyone it sees.

Even if a face is not identified in the first instance, a later mugshot could be used to go on a fishing expedition to build a case around someone against whom there is only the flimsiest of circumstancial evidence. Some might say that retrospective matching is no different to Police checking CCTV to trace a suspect or victim after an incident (for instance, catching Wayne Couzons in the company of Sarah Everard on the CCTV of a passing bus was a very good bit of investigation) - but again, that footage is deleted after a period, and the faces that it has captured were not classified and assigned john doe reference IDs in the interim.

You shouldn't really be in two minds - you've correctly identified a way in which it "could" be okay - but the layers of caveating you've had to lay down to say "it's okay if..." should really tell us it isn't.

The danger is that such information could be worth a lot to try and spot people who appear uninteresting, but who could be inferred to be of more interest if they are spotted repeatedly in scenarios that the police are monitoring. So, someone otherwise not on the radar who is spotted at certain types of protest could suddenly become someone they want to identify and track.

Or that someone merely works in a shop or business in the middle of a "crime hotspot" and therefore enters and exits the area most days. Correlation does not imply causation and all that.

I'm sure we all know about that time German Police spent a lot of time looking for a prolific serial killer/Moriarty character whose DNA turned up at murders all over Germany, even when they had another suspect for the deed itself. Turns out there was a process failure at the factory making evidence and sample bags/containers and the DNA belonged to an employee (or else that job was the perfect cover!).

@Peter Gathercole

Given there are known issues with facial recog systems e.g. even less accurate on some skin "tones" than others, then it is innately discriminatory*.

* No prizes for guessing that accuracy less if you are "black" (a demographic already disproportionately targeted in non automated stop & search) . So gives a nice hi-tech excuse for biased policing.

You've got to remember that the Home Office's core competence is house-training ministers. That could be qualified with "if they need it" because some don't.

It’s also interesting that said Sarah Jones stated “… thousands of dangerous criminals [taken] off our streets…” without offering any concrete evidence to support that claim.

The minister-of-the-month for snoopercams claims they have "taken thousands off the streets". That seems very unlikely. How many people were arrested? How many were prosecuted? How many were jailed? How many would have been caught by conventional policing if PC Plod wasn't sitting in the nick watching snoopercam TV and eating doughnuts?

AIUI: it's not even PC Plod, it's a "trained" wetware contractor at best, and an algorythm (AI??) at worst doing the matching.

"The minister-of-the-month for snoopercams claims they have "taken thousands off the streets"

And what about all the ones her party has released from prison well before their time was up, to make room for these 'thousands' they claim this tech has put behind bars?

UK will leave ECHR soon anyway, because as this case shows, the massive ramp up in surveillance across the country (physical and online tracking) is incompatible with basic right of privacy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mxy2j2elro

"The Conservatives will take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) if they win the next election, Kemi Badenoch has announced."

Welcome to Scarfolk.

Scarfolk welcomes careful drivers.

Is it in East Anglia?

Well, why do you think they wanted to leave the EU? Too much adult supervision for their liking.

But the UK is also totally out of step with the rest of Europe on, basically, Europe.

Hasn't this tech produced near 90% false positive rate in previous tests by the Met?

Do they disclose the current rate?

I agree more criminals will get put behind bars more easily. The problem is successive governments have kept expanding the definition of "criminal" into things it shouldn't encompass, like peaceful protests

Oh no, this will give Bloody Braverman something else to scream about while shilling Farage.

And, of course, the faithful never stop to think that these sorts of situations wouldn't happen if the government didn't stop abusing/ignoring the basic rights that an earlier incarnation of that same government were instrumental in setting up.