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Police could be given the power to use driving licence photographs for facial recognition searches

29 January 2024

The UK government is working to introduce a new law change which will enable police forces to run facial recognition searches through a database containing headshots of every person in Britain who holds a driving licence.

The change could be made possible through a new criminal justice bill, but further driver information regulations will need to be established in consultation with police bodies once the bill is passed.

This comes as the police are increasingly utilising live facial recognition, which compares faces captured on live camera feeds to those contained within databases of known identities at major public events.

Some have raised concerns over the potential threat the database may pose towards privacy rights. Former independent reviewer of the Metropolitan Police’s use of facial recognition Professor Peter Fussey told the Guardian there was ‘insufficient oversight’ of the use of facial recognition systems which can be prone to false identification. He said, “This constitutes another example of how facial recognition surveillance is becoming extended without clear limits or independent oversight of its use. That police find such technologies useful or convenient is not sufficient justification to override the legal human rights protections they are also obliged to uphold.”

Access to driving licence records is currently controlled under government regulations related to the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, which require the police to provide a ‘good cause’ relating to a contravention of road traffic acts in order to access the data.

Interestingly, in 2020 a court of appeal ruled that South Wales police’s use of facial recognition technology had breached privacy rights, data protection laws and equality laws, yet the force has continued to use the technology and live facial recognition was used to monitor people attending Christmas markets last year.

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