FB pixel

Scottish Police admit to using facial recognition software, maintaining image database

| Justin Lee
Categories Biometrics News  |  Facial Recognition  |  Law Enforcement  |  Surveillance
 

Police Scotland has admitted to using face recognition technology to identify individuals captured on CCTV cameras and from other sources, as well as retaining these images in a database, according to a report by Computing.

In a statement in response to a freedom of information (FoI) request, Police Scotland said it has used the technology 440 times, in addition to maintaining a database of 334,000 photographs of individuals taken into custody.

The police force has defended its use of facial recognition technology, which it has been using since 2014.

“Facial search is an intelligence tool that can be used for intelligence development purposes,” said DCI Russell Penman of Police Scotland’s Specialist Crime Division. “It is not used for formal photographic identification procedures, although it does provide intelligence around the suspected identity of an individual whose image has been taken and searched.”

Many civil rights proponents are upset by the revelation of the police’s use of facial recognition technology, including Scottish Liberal Democrats’ justice spokeswoman Alison McInnes, who initiated the FoI request.

“Without adequate safeguards, there is nothing to stop the police using from using this technology for mass surveillance,” said McInnes. “The combination of this database with the new facial recognition software has triggered concerns about the protection of our civil liberties.

Although the police said the photos are erased from the database once court proceedings are dropped or the suspect is found not guilty, McInnes argues that the practice raises key concerns about how these images will be used in concert with facial recognition software in the future.

“It could be used to identify protestors at political events or football fans, stifling freedom of speech,” said McInnes. “I also have real concerns that the privacy of innocent people could be compromised and they could be exposed to the risk of false identification.”

Many are also concerned about the cross-matching of personal data by the authorities that would potentially infringe their privacy. The National Police Database currently has 18 million photographs of citizens and many are worried that these images will eventually be fed into a facial recognition database.

The Scottish National Party previously announced it will develop a “super database” that would store the health records of Scottish citizens and share this information with other government bodies — a plan which many privacy advocates believe is nothing more than the government’s way of inconspicuously creating a national ID scheme.

Article Topics

 |   |   |   |   |   |   | 

Latest Biometrics News

 

App stores enter the age verification debate as social media points fingers

In the dialogue about how to effectively protect young people from accessing adult content online, social media companies take a…

 

Global DPI Summit proposes 7 keys to speed up Africa’s digital transformation

The first-ever edition of the Global DPI Summit which took place at the start of this month in the Egyptian…

 

Deepfake threat still stirring concern about election integrity

The specter of deepfakes continues to hover over the various elections of 2024, and even if little actual deepfake-driven disruption…

 

Veridas teases major facial access deployment at major American stadium

Spain’s Veridas is expanding in Europe and beyond, with movements in the biometric access control space and voice biometrics. Recent…

 

NYU Tandon Computer Science faculty tackling deepfakes

With the support of Google’s Cyber NYC Institutional Research Program (IRP), a team of NYU Tandon School of Engineering researchers…

 

Thales powers Guam Police’s revived biometric system for gun-owner IDs

The Guam Police Department (GPD) will be reinstating its digital fingerprint system for the issuance of firearms identification cards. This…

Comments

25 Replies to “Scottish Police admit to using facial recognition software, maintaining image database”

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Continue Reading

Most Read This Week

Featured Company

Learn More

Biometrics Insight, Opinion

Digital ID In-Depth

Biometrics White Papers

Biometrics Events