Met Police to buy retrospective facial recognition technology

The Met will buy LFR system as part of a £3 million deal with Japanese firm NEC Corporation

The Mayor of London's office has approved a proposal allowing the Metropolitan Police to buy and use retrospective facial recognition (RFR) technology to boost its surveillance capabilities.

The proposal, which was signed last month, describes a four-year deal worth £3,084,000 between the Mayor of London's office and Northgate Public Services, a recently acquired subsidiary of Japanese firm NEC Corporation.

The Mayoral office says that in the coming months, the Metropolitan Police will start using RFR technology to support investigations through the detection and matching of faces.

"The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) will benefit from an updated RFR search capability to enable a more effective use of images and image frames from video data across all types of investigations," the official document reads.

With updated RFR capability, the MPS can process historic images from CCTV feeds, social media and various other sources to identify and catch suspects.

"Technical advancements made over recent years would, if seized, now allow the MPS opportunities that were not previously available to support the detection and matching of faces," the document says.

According to a report by Wired, the Mayor's office has set up an independent scrutiny group called the London Policing Ethics Panel to review and advise the Met Police on its use of RFR.

A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said that RFR technology will shorten the time it takes to identify suspects and help reduce crime in the capital.

But critics are not satisfied with this assertion, warning that RFR technology is dangerously open to abuse, could reinforce existing discrimination, and that it will infringe unacceptably on people's privacy.

Ella Jakubowska, policy advisor at advocacy group European Digital Rights, said that RFR tech can "suppress people's free expression, assembly and ability to live without fear".

Since its inception, facial recognition technology has faced intense criticism from lawmakers and privacy advocates in different countries.

The opponents of the technology cite multiple studies that have found facial recognition systems can suffer from race-, age- and ethnicity-related biases, and could lead to human rights abuses.

They also argue that this technology has the potential to become an invasive form of surveillance.

In June, Elizabeth Denham, the head of the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), said she was "deeply concerned" about the inappropriate and reckless use of live facial recognition (LFR) systems in public spaces.

The ICO has undertaken several investigations into planned applications of LFR technology in recent years, and found problems in all of them.

None of the organisations involved in those probes was able to fully justify the processing of people's data, and none of the systems deployed was found to be fully compliant with the data protection regulations in the UK.

In January last year, the Met announced that LFR technology had moved past the trial stage and was ready to be permanently integrated into everyday policing. One month later, it started deploying LFT cameras at locations in London, where serious offenders were expected to be found.

The Met insisted that it had fully tested the system using police staff and the results suggested that 70 per cent of the wanted offenders would be identified as they walk past the cameras.