Why we need to stop government (and its agents) using facial recognition as surveillance

A big developer at King's Cross plans to introduce facial recognition systems to "ensure public safety" and, while some privacy and data protection concerns have been raised, nobody seems to see just how this represents the normalisation of intrusive surveillance of people going about their everyday lives. It follows on the appalling behaviour of the Metropolitan Police in their trials of using the technology where they assumed that anyone avoiding recognition was guilty.

This is where is ends up:

Within Kashgar, a majority Uighur city, residents must line up to be scrutinized before they can move from place to place. They are legally required to travel with ID cards and to swipe them at each checkpoint. They are also required to expose their faces to cameras that feed their pictures to facial recognition software. At the behest of the national government and regional police forces, Chinese software makers are training their algorithms to distinguish Uighurs from Han, China's ruling ethnic majority. Police officers stationed throughout Kashgar need neither probable cause nor a warrant to detain Uighurs and check their phones for the surveillance software that they're legally required to install.

It may not be as openly racist as the Chinese system but we will get to a point where the widespread use of facial recognition but public and private organisations will destroy the idea that our private activities are not a concern of the public authorities (their agents or those acting in the manner of the King's Cross developer). All of this will be "sold" to the public as being to ensure public safety, to catch criminals or with general wish-wash about 'law-and-order'.

I keep reminding us that the main reason for these intrusive technologies (other than 'they exist and we can use them') isn't public safety but a lack of trust in the public. In surveilling everyone, government and its agents remind us that they don't trust us and signal that, in general, people are not to be trusted. When we talk about the loss of community, the breakdown in social capital and the fragmentation of society, it is this collapse in trust - encouraged by the authoritarian tendencies of government - that is the main cause.

....

On corresponding with politicians...

****

The other week the people who make sure Bradford Council complies with data protection rules and regulations popped along to talk to the Conservative Group. Not specially as they'd planned visits to other groups too with the aim of explaining what we could and couldn't do, what permissions we needed and how we should keep stuff (electronically and otherwise).

The discussion raised a few splutterings - we were told that, without the person's permission, we couldn't share a constituents letter with our ward colleagues or, technically, with an officer, which until you think about it seems a little daft. But, as anyone dealing with the public's interaction with politicians knows, people do not always behave rationally or indeed contact us with wholly benign purpose.

And, as I'm sure all the journalists and such like know, data protection trumps freedom of information - the letter that Mrs Smith wrote to me isn't governed by those rules, it's governed by data protection rules. And unless she has given me permission to share your FOI request will fall on stony ground.

Indeed why should you believe you have some sort of right to see a private exchange of correspondence between me, as a politicians, and a person who chooses to write to me? It really is - in the true meaning of the phrase - none of your business. It seems reasonable for me to say, if asked, that I have corresponded with Mrs Smith but the content of the letters is a matter between me and Mrs Smith not between me, Mrs Smith and the whole of humanity.

And this is as it should be. Those who believe that every last exchange that every single public official has with anyone and everyone should be made public are not only wrong in law but damage the proper delivery of public service, whether it's the MP or councillor responding to the concerns of a resident about her noisy neighbour, a minister fielding letters from people who think they're more important than they are, or indeed a public official dealing with a complaint about his department.

There's a debate to be had about transparency but it isn't about private correspondence but about the manner in which policy decisions are made and the information on which those decisions are taken. At no point does private correspondence between the politician or official and someone outside government come within the scope of that transparency.

....