Category Archives: Facial recognition

Starmer’s live facial recognition plan would usher in national ID, campaigners say

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PM accused of ignoring civil rights and aping autocracies as he proposes new powers after far-right unrest

Civil liberties campaigners have said that a proposal made by Keir Starmer on Thursday to expand the use of live facial recognition technology would amount to the effective introduction of a national ID card system based on people’s faces.

Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, said it was ironic the new prime minister was suggesting a greater use of facial matching on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force.

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Detroit changes rules for police use of facial recognition after wrongful arrest of Black man

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City to pay $300,000 to Robert Williams, whose driver’s license was incorrectly flagged in shoplifting investigation

The city of Detroit has agreed to pay $300,000 to a Black man who was wrongly arrested for shoplifting, and to change how police use facial-recognition technology to solve crimes after the software identified him as a suspect.

The conditions are part of a lawsuit settlement with Robert Williams. His driver’s license photo was incorrectly flagged by facial-recognition software as a likely match to a man seen on security video at a Shinola watch store in 2018.

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Canadian university vending machine error reveals use of facial recognition

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University of Waterloo dispenser displays facial recognition message despite no prior indication it was monitoring students

A malfunctioning vending machine at a Canadian university has inadvertently revealed that a number of them have been using facial recognition technology in secret.

Earlier this month, a snack dispenser at the University of Waterloo showed an error message – Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognition.App.exe – on the screen.

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Facial recognition used after Sunglass Hut robbery led to man’s wrongful jailing, says suit

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Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr’s lawsuit claims he was misidentified as culprit of armed robbery and put in jail, where he says he was raped

A 61-year-old man is suing Macy’s and the parent company of Sunglass Hut over the stores’ alleged use of a facial recognition system that misidentified him as the culprit behind an armed robbery and led to his wrongful arrest. While in jail, he was beaten and raped, according to his suit.

Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr was accused and arrested on charges of robbing a Houston-area Sunglass Hut of thousands of dollars of merchandise in January 2022, though his attorneys say he was living in California at the time of the robbery. He was arrested on 20 October 2023, according to his lawyers.

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Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders

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Exclusive: Privacy campaigners say clause in new criminal justice bill will put all UK drivers on ‘permanent police lineup’

The police will be able to run facial recognition searches on a database containing images of Britain’s 50 million driving licence holders under a law change being quietly introduced by the government.

Should the police wish to put a name to an image collected on CCTV, or shared on social media, the legislation would provide them with the powers to search driving licence records for a match.

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Rite Aid facial recognition misidentified Black, Latino and Asian people as ‘likely’ shoplifters

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Surveillance systems incorrectly and without customer consent marked shoppers as ‘persons of interest’, an FTC settlement says

Rite Aid used facial recognition systems to identify shoppers that were previously deemed “likely to engage” in shoplifting without customer consent and misidentified people – particularly women and Black, Latino or Asian people – on “numerous” occasions, according to a new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. As part of the settlement, Rite Aid has been forbidden from deploying facial recognition technology in its stores for five years.

The FTC said in a federal court complaint that Rite Aid used facial recognition technology in hundreds of stores from October 2012 to July 2020 to identify shoppers “it had previously deemed likely to engage in shoplifting or other criminal behavior”. The technology sent alerts to Rite Aid employees either by email or phone when it identified people entering the store on its watchlist.

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Hundreds of millions of Australian identity checks may have been illegally conducted, Senate hears

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Albanese government is rushing through laws to underpin the ID verification service, say experts who have privacy concerns

Hundreds of millions of identity checks under the federal government’s ID verification service may have been illegally conducted, with the Albanese government rushing through legislation to underpin the service.

Identity verification services are used by government departments and businesses – such as credit card providers and power companies – to combat fraud and identity theft.

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UK police urged to double use of facial recognition software

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Policing minister Chris Philp suggests target of more than 200,000 searches over next six months

Police are being encouraged to double their use of retrospective facial recognition software to track down offenders over the next six months.

Policing minister Chris Philp has written to force leaders suggesting the target of exceeding 200,000 searches of still images against the police national database by May using facial recognition technology.

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Australian federal police tested controversial facial recognition search engine, FOI documents reveal

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Exclusive: The AFP told Senate estimates it is now aware the PimEyes and FaceCheck.ID platforms may have been tested for operational purposes on around 10 occasions

The Australian federal police have tested a controversial facial recognition search engine, possibly for operational use.

Documents obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws show hundreds of connections between AFP devices and the website PimEyes between 1 January and 4 August this year.

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‘Are you kidding, carjacking?’: The problem with facial recognition in policing

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When a pregnant Black woman was falsely arrested, she fought back. Here’s what happened next. Plus, the week in AI

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Porcha Woodruff was eight months pregnant when police in Detroit, Michigan came to arrest her on charges of carjacking and robbery. She was getting her two children ready for school when six police officers knocked on her door and presented her with an arrest warrant. She thought it was a prank.

“Are you kidding, carjacking? Do you see that I am eight months pregnant?” the lawsuit Woodruff filed against Detroit police reads. She sent her children upstairs to tell her fiance that “Mommy’s going to jail”.

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Shoplifters who commit repeat offences to face prison

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Government also plans to make greater use of facial recognition technology as part of crime crackdown bill

Shoplifters, burglars and violent criminals who commit repeat offences will be handed mandatory prison sentences under plans being drawn up by ministers.

The government plans to force judges to impose jail terms when sentencing repeat offenders for shoplifting, burglary, theft and common assault, using new legislation to be included in the crime and justice bill.

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Home Office secretly backs facial recognition technology to curb shoplifting

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Covert government strategy to install electronic surveillance in shops raises issues around bias and data, and contrasts sharply with the EU ban to keep AI out of public spaces

Home Office officials have drawn up secret plans to lobby the independent privacy regulator in an attempt to push the rollout of controversial facial recognition technology into high street shops and supermarkets, internal government minutes seen by the Observer reveal.

The covert strategy was agreed during a closed-door meeting on 8 March between policing minister Chris Philp, senior Home Office officials and the private firm Facewatch, whose facial recognition cameras have provoked fierce opposition after being installed in shops.

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Police using live facial recognition at British Grand Prix

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Northamptonshire force says technology adds ‘extra layer of security’ at Silverstone for F1 race

Police are using live facial recognition (LFR) to scan the faces of people attending the British Grand Prix at Silverstone this weekend.

Northamptonshire police were deploying the technology on Saturday and Sunday to provide “an extra layer of security” at the Formula One race, which 450,000 people were expected to attend, the force said.

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Ministers looking at body-worn facial recognition technology for police

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Government’s intentions revealed in document produced for surveillance camera commissioner

Ministers are calling for facial recognition technology to be “embedded” in everyday policing, including potentially linking it to the body-worn cameras officers use as they patrol streets.

Until now, police use of live facial recognition in England and Wales has been limited to special operations such as football matches and public events such as the coronation.

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Police accused over use of facial recognition at King Charles’s coronation

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Met says technology will not be used to target protesters or activists, but campaigners say use is ‘extremely worrying’

The Metropolitan police has been accused of using the coronation to stage the biggest live facial recognition operation in British history.

The force said on Wednesday it intended to use the controversial technology, which scans faces and matches them against a list of people police want for alleged crimes and could identify convicted terrorists mingling in the crowds.

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ClubsNSW suggests use of facial recognition could go beyond identifying problem gamblers

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Exclusive: Lobby group links technology to identification of people barred from venues for disorderly behaviour

People kicked out of New South Wales pubs for being too drunk could be tracked via facial recognition technology if new laws introduced to parliament last week are not changed, with the powerful gambling lobby refusing to rule out expanding the use of the controversial tool.

A week after ClubsNSW announced it would roll out facial recognition technology to pubs and clubs across the state as a harm minimisation tool that could “only be used to enforce self exclusion” by gamblers, it now concedes its use will be more widespread.

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Business racing to use facial recognition technology, raising concerns the law is too slow to catch up

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Clubs NSW says the scheme will be used to combat problem gambling, but experts warn of a lack of safeguards and regulation

The rollout of facial recognition technology in all New South Wales pubs and clubs shows how business is forging ahead collecting biometric information before the law has had a chance to catch up, experts warn.

The NSW government this week introduced new laws allowing the use of facial recognition throughout pubs and clubs, despite not yet developing rules to guide the rollout.

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Iranian authorities plan to use facial recognition to enforce new hijab law

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Government says it will use technology on public transport in crackdown on women’s dress

The Iranian government is planning to use facial recognition technology on public transport to identify women who are not complying with a strict new law on wearing the hijab, as the regime continues its increasingly punitive crackdown on women’s dress.

The secretary of Iran’s Headquarters for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, Mohammad Saleh Hashemi Golpayegani, announced in a recent interview that the government was planning to use surveillance technology against women in public places following a new decree signed by the country’s hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, on restricting women’s clothing.

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Privacy watchdog to investigate Bunnings and Kmart over use of facial recognition technology

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Information commissioner will look into the personal information handling practices of the retail giants

Australia’s privacy watchdog has launched an investigation into retail giants Bunnings and Kmart over their use of facial recognition technology in some stores.

Consumer group Choice last month revealed Bunnings and Kmart were using the technology – which captures images of people’s faces from video cameras as a unique faceprint that is then stored and can be compared with other faceprints – in what the companies say is a move to protect customers and staff and reduce theft in select stores.

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Microsoft limits access to facial recognition tool in AI ethics overhaul

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Company also restricts use of custom neural voice technology owing to deepfake concerns

Microsoft is overhauling its artificial intelligence ethics policies and will no longer let companies use its technology to do things such as infer emotion, gender or age using facial recognition technology, the company has said.

As part of its new “responsible AI standard”, Microsoft says it intends to keep “people and their goals at the centre of system design decisions”. The high-level principles will lead to real changes in practice, the company says, with some features being tweaked and others withdrawn from sale.

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