{"id":7203,"date":"2025-12-05T22:40:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T22:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/police-uk-surveillance-ai\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T22:40:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T22:40:17","slug":"police-uk-surveillance-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/police-uk-surveillance-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Police Admit AI Surveillance Panopticon Still Has Issues With \u201cSome Demographic Groups\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On Thursday, officials in the UK pledged to roll out<\/a> a country-wide facial recognition system to help police track down criminals. The country\u2019s ministers have launched a 10-week consultation to analyze the regulatory and privacy framework of their AI-powered surveillance panopticon \u2014 but one way or another, the all-seeing eye is on its way.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just one tiny wrinkle: the AI facial recognition cameras have a tendency to misidentify non-white people.<\/p>\n

New reporting by The Guardian<\/em><\/a> notes that testing of the AI tech conducted by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found that it\u2018<\/strong>s \u201cmore likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its search results\u201d \u2014 specifically Black and Asian people.<\/p>\n

Though national police minister Sarah Jones has described facial recognition tech as the \u201cbiggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching,\u201d lower-ranking police commissioners told The Guardian<\/em> that the NPL finding \u201csheds light on a concerning inbuilt bias.\u201d They likewise urged caution on the national rollout, which seems to be falling on deaf ears.<\/p>\n

According to the NPL analysis, the national \u201cretrospective facial recognition tool\u201d \u2014 one of three types of facial recognition software used by national police \u2014 has a \u201cfalse positive identification rate for white subjects (0.04 percent),\u201d which is \u201clower than that for Asian subjects (4.0 percent) and black subjects (5.5 percent).\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis has meant that in some circumstances it is more likely to incorrectly match Black and Asian people than their white counterparts,\u201d the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners said in a statement to The Guardian<\/em>. \u201cThe language is technical, but behind the detail it seems clear that technology has been deployed into operational policing without adequate safeguards in place.\u201d<\/p>\n

What this means for the nation-wide rollout remains to be seen. London is already one of the most heavily surveilled cities<\/a> on Earth, with an estimated 1,552 cameras per square mile<\/a>. Back in November, the Home Office offered funding to seven additional metro police forces to deploy fleets of facial recognition vans<\/a>, joining police in London, South Wales, and Essex, which have been using the vans for some time.<\/p>\n

Each of these vans is hooked into a police\u00a0watchlist, and is outfitted with AI-powered facial recognition cameras on the roof.<\/p>\n

As part of the 10-week consultation, the government collect feedback<\/a> from citizens on whether police using facial recognition systems should be able to cross-reference their watchlist with other databases, like passport and driver\u2019s license registries. Still, given that ministers had already pledged to dramatically expand the facial recognition technology, it\u2019s unclear how highly public opinion will factor into the rollout.<\/p>\n

If all goes according to plan for the system\u2019s boosters, a new national database will be established, holding \u201cmillions of images\u201d of innocent citizens, per The Guardian<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe racial bias in these stats shows the damaging real-life impacts of letting police use facial recognition without proper safeguards in place,\u201d said Charlie Whelton, a policy and campaigns officer with the advocacy group Liberty. \u201cThe government must halt the rapid rollout of facial recognition technology until these are in place to protect each of us and prioritize our rights \u2014 something we know the public wants.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on surveillance:<\/strong> AI Startup Says It Will End Crime by Blanketing the Entire United States in Ever-Watching Spy Cameras<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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The post Police Admit AI Surveillance Panopticon Still Has Issues With \u201cSome Demographic Groups\u201d<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On Thursday, officials in the UK pledged to roll out a country-wide facial recognition system to help police track down criminals. The country\u2019s ministers have launched a 10-week consultation to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,3841,314],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-ethics","category-facial-recognition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}