Warnings have been sounded over a Government minister's idea of a unified national facial recognition database to tackle crime.
At this week's Conservative Party Conference, Crime and Policing Minister Chris Philp, floated the idea of integrating data from the Police National Database and Passport Office with other national Government databases to enable police to find a facial match with the 'click of one button'. In theory, such a database could contain up to 50 million images that could be used to help catch shoplifters, burglars, car and bike thieves.
But criticism is already mounting about the potential risk of damaging public trust.
Professor Fraser Sampson, the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, told the BBC that it was important that the police avoided giving people the impression they were on a "digital line up."
"The state has large collections of good quality photographs of a significant proportion of the population which were originally required and given as a condition of, say, driving and international travel," he said. "If the state routinely runs every photograph against every picture of every suspected incident of crime simply because it can, there is a significant risk of disproportionality and of damaging public trust."
The Ada Lovelace Institute, which works to ensure that data and AI work for people and society, has also raised concerns. It recently commissioned Matthew Ryder KC to review the legal governance of biometric technologies. This found that the current legal framework “is not fit for purpose”, due to “a fragmented and confusing patchwork of laws” and that parliamentary select committees, the biometrics commissioner and other experts all agree on the need to establish proper governance mechanisms before these technologies can be used.
Its associate director (law and policy), Michael Birtwistle, said: “'We are concerned by reports that the government intends to repurpose the UK passport images database for police use... To expand the deployment of facial recognition to a database containing images of millions of members of the British public, without their consent and without the existence of such a framework, would risk creating unprecedented public backlash, setting back trust in public sector use of data and AI.
“There is an important lesson to be learned from the negative public reaction to previous attempts to repurpose personal data, such as GP surgery records.
“We urge the Government to reconsider these proposals and look again at how the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill could be used to deliver the biometrics governance regime the UK so urgently needs.”
