Police custody photos wrongly kept in facial recognition searches, watchdog warns
A watchdog has warned that police are retaining custody photographs that should have been deleted and are keeping them available for facial recognition searches. The concern centers on images being held beyond their lawful period and used in biometric identification systems.
Why this matters: If your photo was taken during an arrest and you were never charged, or charges were dropped, that image is supposed to be removed. Keeping it in a facial recognition database means you are still being identified against, quietly, long after the system was supposed to let you go. That is not a technical glitch. It is a due process problem. The whole point of deletion rules is that innocence has to mean something. A watchdog warning is not the same as a fix.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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