UK govt considering pleas to set police facial recognition use on solid legal ground

The UK government is considering introducing new legislation to back the use of facial recognition by police, Fraud Minister David Hanson says. The idea seems to have the backing of all political parties.

“The government is considering whether further legal clarity is needed in order to maintain public trust and confidence,” Hanson told the House of Lords during a Wednesday hearing.

MPs have been calling for stronger controls, the Biometrics Institute called for unified regulation for the UK’s use of facial recognition in public spaces in February and the Ada Lovelace Institute called for a dedicated regulator for biometrics use in the UK in May.

Members of the upper legislative chamber from all parties indicated support for setting police use of face biometrics on more solid legal footing, and raised objections to the current situation from the rule-setting process to the performance of algorithms.

Labour peer Baroness Chakrabarti argued that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 mandates lawmakers to approve or deny police powers. “So can it be right, my lords, that successive governments have allowed the procurement of this most intrusive technology from any company or government in the world, and its deployment to be a matter for discretion by 43 police forces, for example, in England and Wales.”

Hanson noted the data protection laws, human rights laws, the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice, College of Policing codes of practice, and the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner are among the many protections for the public already in place. He declined to mention that there is currently no Surveillance Camera Commissioner, and therefore no one overseeing the Code of Practice, or that the Biometrics Commissioner role has just been filled after sitting vacant for nearly a year.

“But if that is not enough,” Hanson said facetiously, the home secretary has said “a clear legal framework in place for facial recognition” is needed, and the government plans to reveal its plans “shortly.”

Conservative Baroness Manzoor recounted recent press reports that multiple women have recently been stopped by police as shoplifting suspects, and questioned whether the facial recognition algorithms used are biased. Hanson noted that testing by the NPL has shown the algorithms do not exhibit bias, but that the concerns are part of the motivation for a clearer legal footing. A similar answer was given in response to the next several questions.

Baroness Doocey of the Liberal Democrats warned that other AI technologies more intrusive than facial recognition are coming, and asked if the government will consider appointing a commissioner specifically to oversee such technologies.

Crossbench peer Baroness O’Loan argued that the existing regulatory and oversight bodies do not have sufficient purview over the procurement of facial recognition technologies.

Lord Boateng of Labour generalized the results of NIST testing on demographics, and named several developers whose algorithms were found to have significant demographic disparities. None of the developers named has even been reported as a supplier of facial recognition algorithms to UK police, and Boateng did not specify that he was referring to NIST’s 2019 report, rather than the 2022 follow-up.

But London’s Met Police have admitted in two recent briefings with the House of Lords “that they do not have clear oversight,” said Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, representing the Green Party, asking “in what other area of public-facing policing do the police make up their own rules?”

Perhaps the Surveillance Camera Commissioner could supply an answer, if there was one.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  legislation  |  London Metropolitan Police  |  police  |  UK