When you send off your details and photo to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) for your first driving licence, you’re probably thinking about being able to do things like taking friends on a road trip, dropping the kids off to school or helping elderly relatives get around. Few of us, I imagine, are willingly signing up to join a massive police lineup.
But that’s what new powers that the government is trying to sneak through in the new criminal justice bill mean. The measures – not referred to explicitly in the bill – will allow the police to run facial recognition searches on a database containing 50 million UK driving licence holders, to compare the biometric data contained in their photographs with images captured by CCTV or on social media. This new sweeping power should worry anyone who cares about the fundamental rights to privacy and free expression.
Police forces across England and Wales have been using facial recognition technology for a number of years now – mainly through the use of live facial recognition deployments, which scan crowds at concerts or on busy shopping streets to capture the data of anyone walking past. This is a deeply intrusive and disproportionate use of tech – and when it was first being deployed, Liberty challenged it through the courts. In 2020, our client Ed Bridges won the world’s first legal challenge against South Wales police’s use of live facial recognition, with the judges ruling that SWP’s use of the tech breached privacy rights, data protection laws and equality laws.
Unfortunately, that ruling hasn’t stopped police forces rolling out the tech further – and in recent months we have seen a rapid and worrying expansion in the use of facial recognition, urged on by politicians. Despite denying it, every single police force in the country is using some form of facial recognition, and this year alone it’s been used at protests, Premier League football matches, Christmas markets – and even at a Beyoncé concert.
Earlier this year, when media stories began appearing about a rise in shoplifting, instead of dealing with the root causes of poverty or offering support to struggling families, ministers launched Project Pegasus – a scheme whereby 10 of the country’s biggest retailers will hand over their CCTV images to the police, to be run through police databases using facial recognition technology. In October, policing minister Chris Philp announced plans for police to trawl a number of databases, including the immigration and passport databases, for use in facial recognition searches. And now an opaquely worded clause that was hidden away in a larger piece of legislation is handing the police access to drivers’ sensitive details, too.
Let’s be clear: this expansion of state surveillance is a shocking breach of our rights, and we should not be allowing it to pass quietly into law. The ability to identify and track people makes facial recognition a highly intimidating mass surveillance tool – particularly when seen in the twin contexts of this government’s clampdown on dissent, and the historically low levels of public trust in the police. History tells us that technology of this kind will always be used to monitor and harass minority groups, particularly people of colour, and to surveil those involved in protest movements – handing yet more tools to the police will only put more people at risk of harm.
We know that unnecessary and unfair surveillance doesn’t keep our society safe. Time and time again, this government has handed more powers to the police, including surveillance powers, in response to social issues and dissent – rather than dealing with the root causes or listening to the public’s concerns. Instead of keeping us safe, spy tech used on the population undermines the rights and freedoms that protect us from state control and discrimination. And we know that once the government takes away our rights and freedoms – often in times of crisis – we rarely get them back.
This latest intrusion must be roundly rejected – ministers must remove these powers from the bill, and instead ban the use of facial recognition technology, so that our personal data stays our own.
