Facial recognition technology: A privacy nightmare?
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2021
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Facial recognition technology is in the spotlight as the surveillance watchdog raises privacy concerns over its use by police forces. Are these new technologies making the country safer, or creating a new privacy nightmare?
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Guests:
Fiona Hamilton, crime and security editor, The Times.
Tony Porter, former Surveillance Camera Commissioner for England and Wales.
Host: David Aaronovitch.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to me, but who's listening to you or watching you? |
| 0:10.0 | When you look at new emerging technologies, facial recognition, voice recognition, |
| 0:17.0 | recognition, drone technology, other elements of artificial intelligence, |
| 0:21.0 | we're all surveilled from the moment we leave our house, |
| 0:24.3 | from the moment we wake up inside our house all day. Court decisions in the last few months |
| 0:29.8 | have put a spotlight on the use by the police of facial recognition and AI and the former surveillance |
| 0:36.0 | watchdog has raised the alarm. |
| 0:38.9 | His concern is actually that police the area of surveillance now with far less scrutiny and regulation |
| 0:51.0 | than MI5. You're listening to stories of our times from the Times and the Sunday Times. |
| 0:56.0 | I'm David Ronovich. |
| 0:58.0 | Today, Surveillance Britain. |
| 1:00.0 | Do new technologies make us safer or create a new privacy nightmare? Or both. Remember the summer? |
| 1:15.0 | That's when today's story begins. |
| 1:19.4 | Back in August the Court of Appeal heard the first successful legal challenge to police use of live |
| 1:24.9 | facial recognition technology. And now the outgoing surveillance watchdog is warning there may be many more |
| 1:31.9 | stories like it still to come. |
| 1:34.0 | We'll hear from him later. |
| 1:36.0 | First, Times Crime and Security editor Fiona Hamilton on that landmark legal case. |
| 1:42.0 | It was brought by a chap called Ed Briy. and a and mark legal case. |
| 1:44.0 | It was brought by a chap called Ed Bridges, a guy in his late 30s from Cardiff. |
| 1:48.0 | Now his face was scanned in 2017 when he was out Christmas shopping in Cardiff. A few months later he was attending |
| 1:56.1 | a peaceful anti-arms protests and again he was scanned and he got in contact with Liberty |
... |
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