Privacy downgrade: CCTV is steadily gaining facial recognition capabilities
We should all be concerned about its unregulated expansion says Big Brother Watch
In public and private spaces CCTV is gaining new capabilities with barely any oversight or regulation.
Advanced CCTV cameras are proliferating across public and private domains with no public debate, said Madeleine Stone, legal and policy officer at privacy group Big Brother Watch, in a talk at the PrivSec London event on Wednesday.
Not only is the number of cameras and other connected surveillance devices multiplying, but so are their capabilities. A simple camera may be only a software upgrade away from having real-time facial recognition functionality, for example.
"Live facial recognition is one of the most hyped new forms of biometric surveillance, and its use is steadily growing in the UK," said Stone. Police forces in London and Cardiff are already starting to roll it out, retailers including M&S, Tesco and the Co-op are installing the technology, as are many schools, colleges and offices and even advertising billboards where cameras are used to track viewers' emotions.
Cost pressures are typically cited as a reason for installing advanced CCTV, she said. It's simply cheaper to rig up a camera than to hire a police officer or security guard. In many cases, though, the faith put in their capabilities is unjustified. Several academic studies have found that in the absence of other measures, CCTV cameras do little to cut crime or increase safety.
Facial detection technology is also wildly inaccurate. Between 2016 and 2022, 87% of facial recognition results by cameras used by the Met Police were faulty, according to Big Brother Watch, which uses Freedom of Information (FoI) requests to obtain data from the authorities. The racial biases inherent in such systems are well documented, and in that period more than 3,000 people were wrongly identified.
Call to strip out Hikvision and Dahua
The origin of the cameras also give much cause for concern. Two of the most popular surveillance camera brands, Hikvision and Dahua, are connected to the Chinese government and implicated in its policy of imprisoning of hundreds of thousands of Uighers in "re-education camps" in Xinjiang province, where there is evidence of large scale human rights abuses. China has even been accused of genocide over its treatment of the Uigher minority. "It's unthinkable that UK taxpayers are funding crimes against humanity in China," said Stone.
And it's hard to be sure where the footage ends up. In a recent government report, biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner Fraser Sampson recently said UK policing is "shot through" with Chinese surveillance technology.
"There has been a lot in the news in recent days about how concerned we should be about Chinese spy balloons 60,000 feet up in the sky," Sampson wrote. "I do not understand why we are not at least as concerned about the Chinese cameras six feet above our head in the street and elsewhere."
The two companies are blacklisted by the US and cameras have been removed from European Parliament buildings. The Scottish and Welsh governments have both committed to removing Chinese cameras from public buildings, but Westminster has yet to make any such commitments, despite a call last summer from 67 MPs and Lords have to ban the sale and use of Hikvision and Dahua surveillance equipment in the UK.
Since last November, new installations of Hikvision and Dahua cameras in or around government buildings are banned in the UK and some cameras have been removed from sensitive areas. But campaigners including Big Brother Watch and many MPs want to see that ban extended, and for existing cameras to be removed wherever they are installed.
It is not known how many Hikvision and Dahua cameras there are in the UK, but open source data used by BBW suggests they number hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices plus, no doubt, many more that are not online.
Well over half of all schools and colleges that answered BBW's FoI requests use Chinese CCTV cameras from Hikvision or Dahua, some having facial recognition capabilities turned on. Three out of five public bodies and a number of police forces also saying they deployed devices from the Chinese firms.
Acknowledging there are areas where CCTV cameras genuinely can and do benefit security, Stone said their installation as a default security measure and particularly the creeping use of biometric identification should concern us all.
"There is no law in the UK that mentions facial recognition. Parliament has never even debated this, yet this is one of the most extraordinarily broad invasions of privacy that's being rolled out really without any oversight or regulation."