Facial recognition- what are THEY hiding?

 

In September the long arm of The Surveillance State reached Hampshire, with a "trial" of the technology in Southampton, Winchester and Basingstoke. 322,462 citizens' faces were scanned, and 7 arrested as a result.

322,462 individuals exposed to a digital police line-up without consent, labelled as potential criminals, treated as actual criminals, for the crime of walking down the high street. This dystopian nightmare is only made possible by the fact that under Sunak the Conservatives uploaded 46 million of our passport photos to a facial recognition database, again, without consent.

Following this authoritarian show of force, one of the Libertarian Party's supporters in Southampton filed a freedom of information request to the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, asking for details on the software used, the number of false positives and how the efficacy of the technology is evaluated. The response, (attached to this article) is gobsmacking in its outright dismissal of our concerns.

While the reader can pick out the detail for themselves, in short all requests were denied in the interests of national security. "Terrorism" is mentioned four times. Apparently, divulging information on false positives and the use of AI with facial recognition would allow terrorists "to target specific areas of the UK" and "would be to the detriment of providing an efficient policing service and a failure in providing a duty of care to all members of the public." At least they are "not questioning the motives of the applicant." Nice to have the police remind us that we are not terrorists, even if they are intent on treating us as such.

What we have then is a reality in which The State scans our faces without our permission, feeds it to a faceless algorithm and outsources the act of arrest to artificial intelligence. They then refuse to tell us how often this technology is wrong, because "terrorism."

Supposedly, none of this matters because "if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide." This authoritarian anthem is a complete fallacy, predicated on the falsehood that privacy has no inherent value in itself. The Libertarian Party asks the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary- if you have done nothing wrong, what do YOU have to hide?