The Notebook: The Orwellian use of facial recognition

Dystopian nightmares in Orwell’s 1984 now look eerily prophetic
This weekend marked 75 years since the publication of George Orwell’s seminal 1984 – the classic work of British fiction which embellished the English language with shorthand warnings of an authoritarian future. Or at least, they were supposed to be warnings.

This week is also London Tech Week, where the programme of events is soaked with the language of “innovation” and “transformation” – words that, despite everything we know, are used to imply that technological novelty is inherently good. And whilst big corporate figures hold humble “fireside chats” on such grandiose topics as “The Digitisation of Everything”, the words that are missing from the agenda are privacy, rights, control and freedom. Incidentally, these foundations of our free and democratic country are the things that are being buried in the Big Tech race to the biggest profits – our data is the gold that is being mined.

Big Brother, telescreens, memory hole, Newspeak, thoughtcrime, facecrime were all ideas borne from 1984 that now seem eerily prophetic. In a world where televisions can listen to us, social media companies can collectively censor speech and events, and where neurotech threatens even the privacy of our own thoughts, the word ‘Orwellian’ has become shorthand in its own right to describe the dystopian society he imagined and the one we increasingly live in.

What would Londoner Orwell make of the city today? Could he have imagined the ANPR and ULEZ cameras taking millions of photos of our vehicles every day? Or the police rolling out live facial recognition vans, turning all of our faces into barcodes?

Even for the world’s most famous dystopian fiction writer, this was hard to predict.

Fighting facial recognition misidentification

I’m bringing a legal challenge against the Met Police to roll back their use of live facial recognition cameras in the city. I’m doing this alongside South Londoner Shaun Thompson, a man I witnessed being stopped and interrogated by police at London Bridge following a misidentification by their live facial recognition tech. Police demanded his fingerprints and threatened him with arrest, although he had done nothing wrong.

In fact, Shaun was out helping the community that day. He is a volunteer with the group Street Fathers, which provides a positive male presence for young people and takes knives off the streets of London. As he said to me, “instead of working to get knives off the streets like I do, the police were wasting their time with technology when they knew it had made a mistake”.

In recent months, the Met Police has increased live facial recognition snooping on the public by 1,000 per cent, putting as all at risk of intrusion and misidentifications. I’m proud to stand alongside Shaun on the 75th anniversary of 1984, fighting back. Can you help us? Visit StopFacialRecognition.org

Wasteful policing in Croydon

New figures show that 78 per cent of burglaries in Croydon went unsolved last year – where policing minister Chris Philp is seeking re-election.

This will come as difficult news to Philp – or “Congo Chris” as he’s now known — since he appeared to be confused about whether Congo and Rwanda were different countries in a difficult moment on BBC Question Time recently.

He’s a champion of live facial recognition tech and Croydon has become a hotspot for police facial recognition vans. Perhaps the millions of taxpayers’ pounds he’s spending on algorithms would be better spent on officers to attend and investigate these serious unsolved crimes.

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