More than 110 arrests in first year of Live Facial Recognition rollout
West Yorkshire Police report that their live facial recognition program led to more than 110 arrests in its first year of operation. The figures mark the department's public accounting of results from the technology's deployment.
Why this matters: Police will use that number to argue the technology works. But arrests are not convictions, and the scorecard leaves out a lot. How many people were wrongly flagged? Who was scanned and never told? Live facial recognition runs on everyone in a crowd, not just people police are looking for. That is a mass surveillance tool dressed up as targeted policing. The public deserves more than an arrest count. It deserves to know the error rate, the data retention policy, and whether consent ever entered the picture.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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