Police deploy facial recognition technology to help identify criminals and safeguard vul
Nottinghamshire Police have begun using facial recognition technology as an operational tool to identify criminal suspects and locate vulnerable individuals. The deployment marks a further expansion of live or retrospective facial recognition by a UK regional police force.
Why this matters: Every time a police force rolls out facial recognition, the circle of people being scanned gets wider and the oversight rarely keeps pace. 'Identifying criminals' and 'safeguarding vulnerable people' are sympathetic reasons — they are also broad enough to justify almost anything. The real issue is who gets matched by mistake, what happens to the data of the innocent majority who walk through the frame, and what legal standard the force has to meet before it acts on a result. Those answers are not in the press release.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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