Join calls to ban police use of facial recognition, says Minderoo Centre researchers

Researchers develop “minimum ethical and legal standards” for the governance of facial recognition technology and test them on three British police deployments – with all three failing.

Researchers at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge, today release a new audit to assess the ethics and legality of police use of facial recognition.

Developed for England and Wales, the audit extends to all types of facial recognition for identification, including live, retrospective, and mobile phone facial recognition. They find that all three deployments failed to meet the minimum ethical and legal standards for the governance of facial recognition technology.

Researchers applied this audit to three facial recognition deployments:

– Bridges court case on South Wales Police’s trial of live facial recognition

– Metropolitan Police Service’s trial of live facial recognition

– South Wales Police’s trial of mobile phone facial recognition

These deployments do not incorporate many of the known practices for the safe and ethical use of large-scale data systems.

The reasons for this are:

Privacy:

The deployments may have infringed upon privacy rights, as they may not have been ‘in accordance with the law’ or ‘necessary in a democratic society’, as required by human rights law.

Discrimination:

The deployments were not transparently evaluated for bias in the technology or discrimination in its usage.

Accountability:

The deployments did not ensure that there was a reliable ‘human in the loop’. There were also no clear redress measures for people harmed by the use of facial recognition.

Oversight:

The deployments lacked regular oversight from an independent ethics committee and the public, especially marginalised communities that are disproportionately affected.

Recommendations

Based on their findings, the researchers recommend regulators, civil society groups and researchers to:

1. Use this audit to scrutinise police use of facial recognition:

They encourage others to engage with the broad range of questions about ethics and legality that this audit brings together.

2. Evaluate the use of biometric technologies in other contexts and regions:

They call for a greater focus on how technologies are used in specific geographical and historical contexts, including outside the UK and in the Global South.

3. Join calls for a ban on police use of facial recognition in public spaces:

The current legal framework for governing facial recognition is insufficient to protect against the harms of police use of facial recognition. Given this existing regulatory gap and the failure to meet minimum standards, the researchers from the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy support calls for a ban on police use of facial recognition in publicly accessible spaces.

Report author, Evani Radiya-Dixit, Visiting Fellow, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge, said:

“There is a lack of robust redress mechanisms for individuals and communities harmed by police deployments of the technology.

“Given the ongoing use of facial recognition, we need to assess how police are using the technology today.

“We find that all three of these deployments fail to meet the minimum ethical and legal standards based on our research on police use of facial recognition.

“To protect human rights and improve accountability in how technology is used, we must ask what values we want to embed in technology and also move from high-level values and principles into practice.”

About the audit

Researchers developed this audit as a tool for outside stakeholders, using a review of existing literature and feedback from academia, government, and civil society on the ethics and legality of facial recognition.

The audit is designed based on extensive research as a tool to help

1. Reveal the risks and harms of police use of facial recognition

2. Evaluate compliance with the law and national guidance

3. Inform policy, advocacy, and ethics scrutiny on police use of facial recognition

For press enquiries, please contact Jeremy Hughes, External Affairs Manager, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge: jph79@cam.ac.uk