In a UK first, South Wales Police is introducing ‘semi-permanent’ AI facial recognition cameras across Cardiff city centre, Wales, during this year’s Six Nations rugby internationals. The tech is being rolled out from this Saturday, 22 February – and campaign group Big Brother Watch has rightly hit back.
Facial recognition to go live in Wales
This marks a significant shift, as previously, forces have only deployed mobile live facial recognition vans equipped with a small number of cameras.
The live system is an authoritarian mass surveillance tool that turns the public into walking ID cards. By putting these cameras on our high streets, we’re all being treated like suspects in a digital police line-up, with our photos taken for repeated identity checks – often without us even realising it.
In the last three years of their deployments at sporting events, South Wales Police has made no arrests, yet the public is footing the bill for this expensive and intrusive tech.
Checkpoint Cymru
On Saturday 22 February mass surveillance cameras will be positioned across busy pedestrian points across the city making it impossible for members of the public to avoid them.
Despite limited notice:
- Big Brother Watch is urgently working to engage MPs and Senedd Members to push back.
- Members of the Big Brother Watch team plan to travel to Cardiff to observe.
- The group’s response has been quoted in the press.
The UK: a democratic outlier on facial recognition?
Just this month, the EU’s AI act comes into force, which bans police use of live facial recognition in all but very few extreme circumstances – and only with judicial authorisation first.
Meanwhile, there are zero laws even mentioning the use of facial recognition in the UK, meaning that police forces are making the rules up as they go along.
In fact, no other democracy in the world spies on its population in this cavalier and chilling way.
The legal vacuum when it comes to the police’s use of live facial recognition technology cannot continue.
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Feature image via the Canary
