We should be worried about facial recognition technology

Using facial recognition technology, the Communist Party of China is developing a high-tech tyranny. The aim is to be able to match faces against a database of 1.3 billion ID photos with above 90% accuracy rate. Various cities in China are already using the technology to spot criminals and verify identities. It will become an integral part of the ‘social credit system’ which will keep tabs on people and judge whether they are ‘good’ citizens.

Before long, authoritarian states across the world will use the technology as a tool of oppression. The potential it has for facilitating the persecution of minorities is the stuff of a dictator’s wet dream. It can be used to identify an individual’s race or sexuality and identify their emotional state. It could be used to ID and track whole groups of people attending religious or political gatherings.

We in the West should be looking on in horror at this and speaking out against technological tyranny. Instead, the British police are considering it for use on our streets. In a report from Geoff White for the BBC there is a deeply disturbing occurrence which provides a minor, but telling, example of just how facial recognition will immediately remove rights from all citizens and damage the relationship between the police and the people they serve.

While the police are running a pilot of facial recognition technology, a man walks by and decides to cover his face. The police forced him to show his face and then fined him £90 for ‘disorderly conduct’. Immediately we can see how using the technology facilitates harassment and warps the ideal of the presumption of innocence. When we are all tracked, scanned and databased, we will all simply be people who have not been found guilty yet.

If a British subject cannot walk freely down the street minding his own business without getting arbitrarily harassed because he didn’t want his face scanned, then we are not a free country. If this is rolled out then thousands of people will surely act in the same way, covering their face and refusing to comply, what then?

As ever, it will be sold on its usefulness as a crime fighting tool. Advocates will urge the submission of freedom and privacy in exchange for more security. But as with all surveillance technologies, and all draconian measures introduced under this guise, it will inevitably be misused, and innocent people will suffer.

We heard the same arguments for every single piece of anti-terror legislation. Then the government, the police and even local councils used and abused the powers they gained. Lots of people are all too ready to comply and believe, ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’, the mantra of the slave. Yet any brief research reveals how legislation designed for terrorists was used against the innocent. Look up the names Brian Haw, Maya Evans, Steve Jago, John Catt, Charlotte Dennis, Walter Wolfgang, Nick Gargan, Hicham Yezza and Rizwaan Sabir.

Facial recognition technology is a bigger threat than any of the draconian measures recently dreamed up by our government and security services. Not for nothing did Woodrow Hartzog, Professor of Law and Computer Scient at Northeastern University in Boston, say that “facial recognition technology is the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented.”

The threat to our privacy, freedom of expression, and right of association face being dismissed so the police have yet another of what they like to call a ‘useful tool’. If we gave the police and security services every ‘useful tool’ they asked for we would not have a shred of liberty left. All the same arguments were used to justify identity cards, 90-day detention, secret courts and the snoopers charter.

Facial recognition is being introduced into our lives in various benign ways that offer minor conveniences. We can use it to unlock our phones, to replace passwords and to manage our digital wallets. It won’t be long before we are invited to accept the technology in our ‘smart’ homes and on all our devices. There’s no doubt that it can introduce technological convenience into our homes, our shops, our airports and beyond.

Though once it plays a central role in our lives, we will be invited to accept it as a ubiquitous part of the security apparatus. The right to anonymity will be a thing of the past. Some people will happily accept it because they believe it makes them safer. In some ways this is true, but a CCTV camera in every home, compulsory curfews and GPS microchips in every citizen’s brain would make us safer. That doesn’t make it right.

Facial recognition offers irresistible possibilities for oppression. I don’t trust any government not to use it to arbitrarily track the movements of its citizens. Not to mention being able to track their interests, habits and relationships easier than ever before. It is the perfect tool for authoritarian control and will eliminate our privacy if we don’t object.

Unlike giving fingerprints, or blood samples, there is no need for active consent. Facial recognition can identify you from a distance and without your knowledge. If we don’t stop and consider the serious implications now, this will be forced on us and it will be much harder to apply legal limits retrospectively.

Before you know it, it’ll be the year 2030 and our society will resemble a dystopic hybrid from the imaginations of Orwell, Huxley and Philip K Dick. It’ll be a technological utopia of convenience. We’ll all be too busy using our gormless faces to turn TV the on to realise we’re already too far down the road to serfdom to turn back.

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