Only use facial recognition cameras to hunt wanted criminals, Mahmood tells police
UK minister Shabana Mahmood has directed police to limit their use of facial recognition cameras to identifying wanted criminals, setting a boundary on how the surveillance technology can be deployed.
Why this matters: This sounds like a restriction, but read it carefully. Telling police to use facial recognition only for wanted criminals still means cameras scanning crowds of innocent people to find them. Everyone in range gets checked. The limit is on the outcome, not the collection. That distinction matters. A rule about who you can arrest is not the same as a rule about who you can watch. The harder question is what happens to all the faces that did not match.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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