Professor Richard Buckland

You're spot on.

If it's used at protests, for example, imagine we're back in the old days where it was illegal to be homosexual, a criminal offence.

Then if there was a protest for gay rights, having a camera there identifying people in real time, you know, obviously means that a database can be built of people.

Now, you could argue, well, we could have the camera and not record it in real time.

You know, we could have the camera and analyse this later.

But that's a much bigger job once you've got it.

You know, you probably know yourself.

If you get a book and read it, it's easy.

But if you put it in that pile of books and that pile just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it's much harder to search.

So giving people real-time capability to update databases means...

You could identify people who are violating the law, even when, perhaps, it's not a law we're totally happy with.

And it's a chilling effect, really, on your ability to protest, like we saw in China and Hong Kong.

So in the States, they do a lot of facial recognition stuff, and it's being used to identify people that the police are interested in because they've had a long history of doing that.

But I do think the big problem in the States is the chilling effect, that you would now be frightened to protest against things you might think are egregious.

And then there's this other question, which is once your movements are tracked and known and that data is stored somewhere, who has access to this?

So in the States, there are examples where the police, individuals, insiders inside the police, use it for tracking their spouse, use it for finding spouses who've escaped them for family violence reasons.

One police.

Officer used it to track down and date someone he thought was interesting and work out where they lived and where they went and all sorts of things like that.

Even if the government and the police as an organization say they're going to look after the data and it's being used for good purposes, of course, individuals have access to the data.

And then the extension of that is if they break into this database, so do criminals.