Facial recognition technology could be used more often by UK police forces, according to new plans announced by the Home Office. Policing and crime minister Sarah Jones said a widespread rollout of the equipment could mark the biggest breakthrough in catching criminals since DNA matching. People are being asked for their views on its use, as part of a 10-week consultation launched on Thursday, possibly paving the way for new laws. Jones credited the technology for helping to arrest thousands of criminals, but campaign group Big Brother Watch said increased use would make George Orwell roll in his grave. Facial recognition is used to locate wanted suspects and find vulnerable people.

A searchable database of public records concerning use of force and misconduct by California law enforcement officers -- some 1.5 million pages from nearly 700 law enforcement agencies -- is now available to the public. The Police Records Access Project, a database built by UC Berkeley and Stanford University, is being published by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and CalMatters. It will vastly expand public access to internal affairs records that show how law enforcement agencies throughout the state handle misconduct allegations and uses of police force that result in death or serious injury. The database currently includes records from nearly 12,000 cases. The database is the product of years of work by a multidisciplinary team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civil liberties advocates, led by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), UC Berkeley Journalism's Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) and Stanford University's Big Local News.

The city of Detroit has agreed to pay 300,000 to a Black man who was wrongly arrested for shoplifting and to also 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. "We are extremely excited that going forward there will be more safeguards on the use of this technology with our hope being to live in a better world because of it," Williams told reporters, "even though what we would like for them to do is not use it at all." The agreement was announced Friday by the American Civil Liberties Union and the civil rights litigation initiative at University of Michigan Law School.

An ex-employee has accused Amazon of breaching UK sanctions by selling facial recognition technology to Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine, The Financial Times reported. Charles Forrest alleged that he was unfairly dismissed in 2023 after accusing Amazon of wrongdoing on a number of issues between November 2022 and May 2023, according to the article. The allegations were presented to a London employment tribunal as part of a hearing this week. Forrest said that Amazon closed a deal with Russian firm VisionLabs to provide access to its Rekognition facial recognition technology. It did that "through what appears to be a shell company based in the Netherlands," according to the tribunal filings.

A Beyoncé gig, the coronation of King Charles, and the British Formula One Grand Prix all have one thing in common: Thousands of people at the events, which all took place earlier this year, had their faces scanned by police-operated face recognition tech. Backed by the Conservative government, police forces across England and Wales are being told to rapidly expand their use of the highly controversial technology, which globally has led to false arrests, misidentifications, and lives derailed. Police have been told to double their use of face searches against databases by early next year--45 million passport photos could be opened up to searches--and police are increasingly working with stores to try to identify shoplifters. Simultaneously, more regional police forces are testing real-time systems in public places. The rapid expansion of face recognition comes at a time when trust in policing levels are at record lows, following a series of high-profile scandals.

The use of police drones is "poised to explode" in the next year as law enforcement takes advantage of the technology's proliferation, leaving public regulation and transparency efforts in danger of being caught woefully behind, civil rights advocates warn. "A world where flying robotic police cameras constantly crisscross our skies is one we have never seen before," Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a report released Thursday. "Yet there are strong reasons to believe that such a world may be coming faster than most people realize." At least 1,400 police departments across the country are using drones in some fashion, but only 15 have obtained waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly their drones beyond the visual line of sight, or BVLOS, of operators. That means the vast majority of departments are still limited in the types of calls they can respond to with drones.

However, in Massachusetts there is hope for those who want to restrict police access to face recognition. The state's lawmakers are currently thrashing out a bipartisan state bill that seeks to limit police use of the technology. Although it's not a full ban, it would mean that only state police could use it, not all law enforcement agencies. The bill, which could come to a vote imminently, may represent an unsatisfying compromise, both to police who want more freedom to use the technology and to activists who want it completely banned. But it represents a vital test of the prevailing mood around police use of these controversial tools. That's because when it comes to regulating face recognition, few states are as important as Massachusetts.

Police should be banned from using live facial recognition technology in all public spaces because they are breaking ethical standards and human rights laws, a study has concluded. LFR involves linking cameras to databases containing photos of people. Images from the cameras can then be checked against those photos to see if they match. British police have experimented with the technology, believing it can help combat crime and terrorism. But in some cases, courts have found against the way police have used LFR, and how they have dealt with infringements of the privacy rights of people walking in the streets where the technology has been used.

Far too often artificial intelligence in policing is fed data collected by police, and therefore can only predict crime based on data from neighborhoods that police are already policing. But crime data is notoriously inaccurate, so policing AI not only misses the crime that happens in other neighborhoods, it reinforces the idea that the neighborhoods they are already over-policed are exactly the neighborhoods that police are correct to direct patrols and surveillance to.

Decades ago, when imagining the practical uses of artificial intelligence, science fiction writers imagined autonomous digital minds that could serve humanity. Sure, sometimes a HAL 9000 or WOPR would subvert expectations and go rogue, but that was very much unintentional, right? And for many...