On the 13 November 2024 a debate took place in the UK parliament on the police’s use of facial recognition technology (FRT) for the first time, despite facial recognition being used as far back as 2017.
The issue was debated by 13 members of parliament (MPs) representative of a range of political parties, as well as the Minister for Fire, Policing and Crime Prevention. Throughout the debate several MPs raised concerns around privacy, surveillance, issues of facial recognition disproportionately misidentifying people from ethnic minorities and women and leading to further discrimination of communities who already feel they are over policed. As well as acknowledging that this is all occurring within a legislative void as the Minister for Policing confirmed that “no one specific law gives the police the power to use live facial recognition”.
While this debate is a welcomed step, we need to seize this momentum and expedite further discussions within Parliament to introduce the necessary legislative proposals that would establish restrictions and safeguards on the use of FRT. To this end, following the debate we wrote to MPs who intervened asking them to table written and/or oral questions to the Prime Minister, Home Secretary and the Minister for Policing.
This is part of our wider campaign “The End of Privacy in Public” which enables members of the public to write to their MP to demand if FRT is being used in their constituency.