Security and Policing: Facial Recognition Technology

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for initiating this debate. Your Lordships may wonder why I am speaking in it. It is true that my interest in facial recognition is more linked to medicine in identification and progression of disease, but that is not why I am speaking today. I am speaking because of another interest, which is that my university, the University of Dundee, has a strong forensic science department, analysing all aspects of biometrics for both crime detection and human identification. I am also chairman of the Science and Technology Committee of your Lordships’ House, which conducted a brief seminar on the use of forensic science in the detection of crime and elsewhere, and may well conduct a more detailed inquiry on the subject.

Facial recognition comes under the purview of the Forensic Science Regulator, which is not a statutory authority, but also the Biometrics Commissioner and the CCTV commissioner. Research in this area is therefore very police-needs driven, and a commercial element has therefore crept into software provision. Three areas of work have lately raised questions about facial recognition. The first relates to so-called super-recognisers. This concerns research out of Greenwich, and although there is strong evidence to suggest that some people are indeed better at recognising faces than others, there is some evidence that they are not the golden bullet that everyone hoped for.

A second issue concerns the ethics associated with retention of images when the person has either been released without charge or been found innocent of charges. Facial images are taken routinely in custody, and at present, as has been mentioned, there is no mandate for them to be deleted from the police national computer. This may come in due course, but the suggestion that someone may have to apply to have their images deleted cannot be satisfactory.

The third is linked, and is about using faces of known persons of interest when scanning crowds to find those individuals. As has been mentioned, this was employed at the Notting Hill Carnival and more recently at one of the 6 Nations rugby matches. The police state that widespread awareness notices are used in such places, that they check only against faces that they are looking for, and that no others are stored. This is an issue of questionable ethics and is currently under discussion, with the issue of covert versus overt collection of faces highly relevant.

We need to: define clear legal roles for collection of data; limit the type and amount of data stored and retained; limit storage to only one biometric in a single database, not all biometric data; define clear rules for the storing and sharing of data; impose strict security procedures to prevent improper access and data compromise; use mandatory notice procedures when technology such as I mentioned is used at Notting Hill and on other crowds—clear notices that the technology is being used—and define and standardise audit trail accountability and independent oversight of the use of data. I hope that the Minister will comment on that.