To the horror of civil liberties campaigners, London's Metropolitan Police has announced plans to use live facial recognition cameras in the capital. Facial recognition technology gives the state unprecedented power to track and monitor any one of us, destroying our privacy and our free expression," says Clare Collier, advocacy director at Liberty. It pushes us towards a surveillance state in which our freedom to live our lives free from state interference no longer exists." The UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), last year investigated the use of facial recognition in public places - and concluded that there needed to be improvements in how police authorized and deployed the technology. And the move comes just days after the news that the EU is considering a temporary blanket ban on the use of facial recognition in public places while the impact and risk are evaluated.

Source: Forbes January 24, 2020 13:41 UTC