Boardmasters Festival: Police defend controversial live facial recognition technology used on thousands of attendees
Police have defended their use of live facial recognition technology at the Boardmasters Festival in the UK, where the system scanned thousands of attendees without most of them having any prior notice or meaningful choice to opt out.
Why this matters: Tens of thousands of people went to a music festival and had their faces scanned by police. Most of them probably had no idea. That is a big deal. A festival is not an airport or a courthouse — it is a place people go to relax. Treating every attendee as a face to be checked against a database is a form of mass surveillance, even if the technology works perfectly. The burden of justification should be high. 'It helped us find some people' is not the same as 'it was proportionate to do this to everyone.'
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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