Contribution
Thank you, Dame Siobhain, for your merciful chairpersonship. I thank the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) for introducing this crucial debate.
Like many others, I have many concerns about live facial recognition technology, some of which have already been raised, but I will focus my remarks on the room for error and the potential impact that this technology will have on already dwindling public trust in police, particularly among black, Asian and ethnic minority citizens. I will raise points similar to those of my hon. Friends the Members for Liverpool Riverside (Kim Johnson) and Brent East (Dawn Butler).
Live facial recognition technology compares live CCTV images with those already on the police database and other images taken from open source, publicly available image sites. This is a deeply flawed plan that could result in serious mix-ups. A simple mislabelling on an image database could lead to the wrong person being stopped and a potentially traumatic experience with the police.
I can illustrate my point with a short anecdote; this happened to me a mere few months after I was elected to this House. My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova) was speaking in the Chamber. BBC Parliament miscaptioned her as my hon. Friend the Member for Brent East and, when they spotted this, both Members took to Twitter to point out the mistake. In their haste to cover the story, the Evening Standard incorrectly used a picture of me instead of my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea—I hope everybody is following this—and in its apology to all three of us, it suggested that Getty Images, where they had taken the image from, had labelled most of the pictures of me, since I had been elected, with the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea. Since then, to avoid embarrassment, it seems that most publications now use pictures of me looking like a constipated walrus, but they have said that their reason for this is that they can be sure it is me and they want to avoid any further embarrassment.
Although problematic, that is a far more trivial example of what can happen when images are mislabelled, but if humans can make these errors, the technologies they create obviously can. If online sources are going to be used as part of the image database, it is almost inevitable that images will be mislabelled and that innocent people will be subject to needless run-ins with the police.
Questions around the numerical similarity score used to determine matches also ought to be raised. We already know that facial recognition data has racial bias: it is deeply flawed when attempting to identify people with darker skin tones, just as Getty Images is, and the Metropolitan police’s own testing of its facial recognition algorithm identified disproportionately higher inaccuracy rates when attempting to identify people of colour and women.
People of colour are already disproportionately stopped and searched at higher rates, and the use of potentially flawed technology will serve only to increase the rate at which ethnic minorities are stopped, searched and possibly even incorrectly detained, further dampening trust in the police among these communities. We know that that needs to be resolved. To any Member who thinks that I am exaggerating the potential for misidentification, I say this: in 2023, Big Brother Watch found that over 89% of UK police facial recognition alerts wrongly identified members of the public as people of interest. In that case, what benefits does this technology bring? It has been used in the borough of Lambeth, including in my own constituency, on a number of occasions, but as far as I am aware it has not produced a substantial number of results. Our constituents are effectively being placed under constant surveillance. The notion of their presumed innocence, which sits at the heart of our justice system, has been undermined, and this “cutting-edge” technology has not produced substantial results.
With some 6 million CCTV cameras in the UK, which all have the potential to be converted into facial recognition cameras, we are veering dangerously close to becoming a police state with levels of surveillance that would be deemed acceptable only in the most authoritarian of dictatorships. I believe that our liberty and our security can co-exist. It is not a matter of “those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear”; it is a matter of the basic principles of freedom and privacy. Those basic principles begin to draw into question what such surveillance is really here for. Is it here to keep us safe or to monitor us 24/7?
Most Members would undoubtedly, I hope, protest at the idea of police randomly stopping members of the public to check their fingerprints or other DNA against databases just for a possible match. Why should we look at this intrusive automated biometric software any differently?