Automated Facial Recognition (AFR)

Main deployments

Europe

United Kingdom

Mandate

Scotland Yard’s legal mandate for using live facial recognition states that the Human Rights Act recognises action in the interests of national security, public safety and the prevention of disorder or crime as legitimate aims.1

Uses in 2020

Scotland Yard has this year deployed cameras to scan shoppers

• In Stratford, east London
• At Oxford Circus in London2
  • The Oxford Circus deployment on 27 February scanned 8,600 faces to see if any matched a watchlist of more than 7,000 individuals. During the session, police wrongly stopped five people and correctly stopped one.

South Wales police used the technology at a Slipknot concert at the Cardiff City football club stadium in January 2020, as well as to monitor football fans2.

Police forces in Hull, Leicestershire, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford and Brighton have also experimented with the technology in recent years, according to research by the campaign group Big Brother Watch2.

North America

United States

Clearview controversy

Clearview has attracted a whirlwind of attention for claiming that it had built unprecedented facial recognition trained on an ever-increasing database of more than 3 billion photos ripped from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other websites3arviewFacialRecognition]]>‘Clearview’s Facial Recognition App Has Been Used By The Justice Department, ICE, Macy’s, Walmart, And The NBA’, BuzzFeed News, accessed 28 February 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-fbi-ice-global-law-enforcement.</ref>

In a bombshell January story by the New York Times, it was revealed that Clearview had scraped billions of photos from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms. That report prompted an outcry from, well, everyone because the practice is, at best, morally questionable and creepy as hell. That Times story resulted in a wave of backlash. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Venmo all issued cease-and-desist requests to Clearview over the practice and state of New Jersey is now looking to end its relationship with the company. Meanwhile, the company's CEO, Hoan Ton-That, said he had a First Amendment right to all those publicly available photos. Uh huh.3 />

The internal documents, which were uncovered by a source who declined to be named for fear of retribution from the company or the government agencies named in them, detail just how far Clearview has been able to distribute its technology, providing it to people everywhere from college security departments to attorneys general offices, and in countries from Australia to Saudi Arabia. BuzzFeed News authenticated the logs, which list about 2,900 institutions and include details such as the number of log-ins, the number of searches, and the date of the last search. Some organizations did not have log-ins or did not run searches, according to the documents, and BuzzFeed News is only disclosing the entities that have established at least one account and performed at least one search. Even with that criteria, the numbers are staggering and illustrate how Clearview AI, a small startup founded three years ago, has been able to get its software to employees at some of the world’s most powerful organizations. According to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News, people associated with 2,228 law enforcement agencies, companies, and institutions created accounts and collectively performed nearly 500,000 searches — all of them tracked and logged by the company3 />.

Dataworks Plus

+ Add Wolfcom here

China

AI and big data played a significant role in China’s response to COVID-19, according to a WHO report compiled by about a dozen outside health professionals and released last month.4>VentureBeat. ‘AI Weekly: Coronavirus, Facial Recognition, and the Future of Privacy’, 6 March 2020. https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/06/ai-weekly-coronavirus-facial-recognition-and-the-future-of-privacy/.</ref>

The assessment finds that swift action by Chinese authorities to limit travel and quarantine entire cities potentially kept hundreds of thousands of people from being infected. But many also criticized China’s measures as draconian.4 />

It’s unclear to what extent facial recognition played a role in enforcement of public safety in China, but a coauthor of the WHO study told Science that China is making strides on COVID-19 through “good old social distancing and quarantining, very effectively done because of that on-the-ground machinery at the neighborhood level facilitated by AI and big data.”4 />

China quarantined 50 million people in cities like Wuhan and used WeChat and Alipay to track people’s movement and keep infected individuals from traveling. The government also deployed facial recognition and thermal sensors in drones and helmets.4 />

Statistics

Prof Peter Fussey, an expert on surveillance from Essex University who conducted the only independent review of the Metropolitan police’s public trials on behalf of the force, has found it was verifiably accurate in just 19% of cases.1 /> In January 2019, the Information Commissioner’s Office commissioned research into public perceptions about its use. Of those surveyed, 58% thought it was acceptable to be stopped erroneously by the police, while 30% thought it was unacceptable.1 />

Criticisms

United Kindgom

The demands for the technology to be halted add to pressure from civil liberties organisations, including Amnesty International, which has described the Met’s rollout as “putting many human rights at risk, including the rights to privacy, non-discrimination, freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly”. 2

United States

“Government agents should not be running our faces against a shadily assembled database of billions of our photos in secret and with no safeguards against abuse,” Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU, said to BuzzFeed News. “More fundamentally, that so many law and immigration enforcement agencies were hoodwinked into using this error-prone and privacy-invading technology peddled by a company that can't even keep its client list secure further demonstrates why lawmakers must halt use of face recognition technology, as communities nationwide are demanding."3 />

Legal Challenges

But last September, the high court refused a judicial review of South Wales police’s use of the technology. Judges ruled that although it amounted to interference with privacy rights, there was a lawful basis for it and the legal framework used by the police was proportionate “The law is clearly on the back foot with invasive AFR and predictive policing technologies,” said Rebecca Hilsenrath, chief executive at the EHRC2.

In a report to the United Nations on civil and political rights in the UK, the EHRC said: “Evidence indicates many AFR algorithms disproportionately misidentify black people and women and therefore operate in a potentially discriminatory manner … Such technologies may replicate and magnify patterns of discrimination in policing and have a chilling effect on freedom of association and expression.”2

Art

Artists Georgina Rowlands (left) and Anna Hart (right), of the Dazzle Club, which holds monthly walks in London to raise awareness of AFR technology and ‘rampant surveillance’. Their facepaint is to confuse the cameras. Photograph: Kelvin Chan/AP Photo1 />

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What links here

• Project Timeline ‎ (← links)
• AFR in Denmark ‎ (← links)