BIOMETRICS
Facial Recognition – Impacts and effects of Privacy Regulations David Horsburgh CPP PSP PCI, Managing Director at Security Risk Management, presented to a sold-out ASIS Auckland Breakfast Meeting in November. His message: facial recognition use potentially breaches privacy principles. This presentation seeks to consider the legal and ethical impediments to the use of facial recognition technology. Live street surveillance systems have traditionally identified events in real time that require intervention or have been used as a post-event investigation tool. In contrast, live facial recognition technology targets the individual comparing people against a database of faces – a watchlist. This key point of difference is a precipitator to increasing international opposition to the technology. In May 2019, the City of San Francisco became the first US city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by local government agencies. In October 2019, the city of Berkeley followed suit, and it is expected that a number of other cities
David Horsburgh CPP PSP PCI, Managing Director at Security Risk Management
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NZSM
in the US will ban the technology. In May 2019 during live facial recognition trials by the UK Metropolitan Police a man was charged with disorderly behaviour as he walked past a police van that was equipped with facial recognition cameras – because he hid his face. In August 2019, a Swedish school was fined 20,000 euros by the Swedish Data Protection Authority for using facial recognition to check pupil attendance at the school. With this project I have developed two hypotheses: • Does the state agency use of facial recognition breach the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBoRA) and the Privacy Act 1993?
• Does the private sector use of live facial recognition technology breach the Privacy Act? The research has developed strong support for the argument that facial recognition by state agencies breaches the Bill of Rights Act and Privacy Act, and that private company use is likely to be in breach of Privacy Act principles. Primary sources of my research have been the Independent review of the [UK] Metropolitan Police live facial recognition field trials, which was conducted by a US university; United States press articles that deal with both US and Chinese use of facial recognition; European and UK press articles; Article
December 2019/January 2020
