British police proceed to carry thousands and thousands of pictures of harmless residents a decade after being ordered to destroy them, the UK’s outgoing biometrics and surveillance commissioner has revealed.
Fraser Sampson, who will finish his time period tomorrow, informed The Guardian {that a} excessive court docket ruling in 2012 ordered police to get rid of custody images for people who had been subsequently not charged with any crimes.
He estimated the variety of these images to be “nicely over” three million.
“Eleven years later they’ve nonetheless obtained them. And the reply to that has been: ‘Nicely they’re retained on a database that doesn’t have the majority delete functionality,’” Sampson informed the paper.
“I’ve mentioned: ‘Nicely that may’t probably be a defence since you constructed it.’ So what the police are attempting to do in the intervening time is migrate that, create a brand new database and transfer every thing off it that’s respectable, and by a means of elimination all that’s left will be deleted. However when it comes to public belief and confidence it’s not an excellent place to be if that’s the one plan you may have.”
Learn extra on facial recognition: Police Use of Facial Recognition Dominated Illegal in World-First Case
Retention of such pictures can be of explicit concern in an age of AI-powered facial recognition expertise, which could possibly be used to select suspects out of a crowd if they supply a match.
Sampson argued there are presently inadequate checks and balances governing police use of such privacy-invasive expertise.
Databases of facial pictures could possibly be compiled not simply by seize from official police cameras but additionally from social media, the place large volumes are shared every day by non-public customers.
“Impulsively you’ll be able to faucet that ocean. Our regulatory framework hasn’t seen any account of that in any respect. It nonetheless simply regulates these cameras which might be owned and operated by police and native authorities, which is a tiny fraction,” Sampson argued.
Controversial facial recognition agency Clearview AI has constructed a database of billions of pictures scraped from the web to assist legislation enforcement shoppers determine suspects through surveillance cameras.
Nonetheless, it just lately escaped a multimillion-pound regulatory nice after a UK court docket dominated that it solely supplied companies to non-UK or EU legislation enforcement.
