British capitalism wants to do its bit in the fight against the rising, and more rising cost of living. It wants to do its bit to protect profits! Wait for the, if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve nothing to fear, argument to appear.
The Observer, 29th July, carried a story about the Home Office secretly planning ‘to lobby the independent privacy regulator in an attempt to push the rollout of controversial facial recognition technology into high street shops and supermarkets’.
The covert strategy was agreed during a closed-door meeting on 8 March between policing minister Chris Philp, senior Home Office officials and the private firm Facewatch, whose facial recognition cameras have provoked fierce opposition after being installed in shops.
In a development that ignores critics who claim the technology breaches human rights and is biased, particularly against darker-skinned people, minutes of the meeting appear to show Home Office officials agreeing to write to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) advocating the merits of facial recognition technology in tackling “retail crime”.
Mark Johnson, advocacy manager of the campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: “The Home Office must urgently answer questions about this meeting, which appears to have led officials to lean on the ICO in order to favour a firm that sells highly invasive facial recognition technology.
“Government ministers should strive to protect human rights, not cosy up to private companies whose products pose serious threats to civil liberties in the UK.”
The minutes of the previously undisclosed meeting reveal that Philp – appointed policing minister by Rishi Sunak last October – and Simon Gordon, the founder of Facewatch, discussed “retail crime and the benefits of privately owned facial recognition technology”’.
Big Brother Watch have also said, ‘ Home Office Minister Chris Philp is pushing police forces and shops to start rolling out Orwellian live facial recognition technology.
Just
last month Northamptonshire Police announced they were deploying live
facial recognition against
protesters.
This came days after the European Court of Human Rights found
Russia's use of the same technology to arrest a protester was
unlawful.
Live
facial recognition uses cameras to scan the facial features of
members of the public in open spaces, comparing their faces to a
hidden watchlist database of images in real time. This suspicionless
mass surveillance tool treats everyone like a potential criminal, and
has no place in the UK.
Live
facial recognition is not an efficient crime fighting tool, with the
police’s own statistics revealing that more than 8
out of 10 facial recognition matches have been inaccurate
since its introduction.
Walking down the street anonymously could soon be a thing of the past if the spread of live facial recognition is not resisted.
While lawmakers in the EU are edging closer to passing an all out ban on the use of live facial recognition in public spaces through the Artificial Intelligence Act, the UK is aligning itself with autocracies like Russia and China.
https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campaigns/stop-facial-recognition/
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