UK's facial recognition technology 'breaches privacy rights'

Automated facial recognition technology that searches for people in public places breaches privacy rights and will "radically" alter the way Britain is policed, the court of appeal has been told. At the opening of a legal challenge against the use by South Wales police of the mass surveillance system, lawyers for the civil rights organisation Liberty argued that it is also racially discriminatory and contrary to data protection laws. In written submissions to the court, Dan Squires QC, who is acting for Liberty and Ed Bridges, a Cardiff resident, said that the South Wales force had already captured the biometrics of 500,000 faces, the overwhelming majority of whom are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Bridges, 37, whose face was scanned while he was Christmas shopping in Cardiff in 2017 and at a peaceful anti-arms protest outside the city's Motorpoint Arena in 2018, says the use of automatic facial recognition (AFR) by South Wales police caused him "distress". The case has been brought after South Wales police and the Home Office won a high court case last year that effectively gave the green light for national deployment of the technology.