Jessica Murray

So one of the people I spoke to, Warren, he expressed concern that although FaceWatch say that their technology is 99.98% accurate, there's no kind of breakdown of

how that changes between different groups of people.

So, you know, research on facial recognition technology more generally has found that black and Asian people are more likely to be misidentified.

These examples are still few and far between.

And, you know, the technology is quite effective.

But I think, you know, if it comes to the point where, you know, millions and millions of people are being scanned every single day, even if there's only a small margin of error, that does equate to quite a lot of people.

So as this becomes more widespread and more and more police forces across the UK start using it, I think those cases of, you know, misidentification, wrongful arrest, I think we could see more of those.

Yeah, so I think a lot of the critics of live facial recognition technology very much want to see some sort of framework in place that would ensure that it's only used, I guess, proportionally.

So if they can go and knock on someone's door or do other manual checks, that they should always opt for that over just using facial recognition technology.

I think that there's a concern that police will just rely on this all the time, that it will become just almost the default for any background check or anything like that.

And I think it's also what kind of crimes it's being used for.

As I say, I think the general public probably wouldn't disagree that if it's being used to kind of catch terrorists or sex offenders, then, you know, then, okay, that's something that we should be doing.

But if it's kind of being used to, you know, fine people who haven't paid a parking fine or something like that, it's, you know, where's the limits of how it's going to be used?

Yeah, I think the thing that makes this a bit different is the power imbalance of it, I guess.

It's people in positions of authority, like the police, like the security guards at your supermarket, who can use this.

I mean, they can use it against you if they want to.

They can use it to arrest you.

They can use it to ask you to leave a shop, which I guess is what sets it apart from other forms of video monitoring.

I think ultimately it's only going to become more advanced.

It's only going to become cheaper as more and more companies kind of get these algorithms and learn how to roll it out.