Ed Bridges says the police infringed his human rights courtesty of liberty

A man from Cardiff, UK, says the police breached his human rights when they used facial recognition technology, but today a court ruled that the police’s actions were lawful. That is, however, hardly the end of the matter.

South Wales Police has been trialling automated facial recognition (AFR) technology since April 2017. Other forces around the country are testing similar systems, including London’s Metropolitan Police.

The man, Ed Bridges, may have been snapped shopping during a pilot scheme called AFR Locate. This involved taking pictures of people’s faces from live CCTV feeds and processing them in real time to extract biometric information. If a face matched a database of people on a police watch list, they would be flagged. Otherwise, the data was deleted immediately. The force used this technology about 50 times at public events between May 2017 and April 2019, including at football matches and concerts. An estimated 500,000 faces were scanned.


At the hearing, it emerged that the police could not now check whether images of Bridges had been taken. If they had been, his pictures would have been deleted.

The court found that AFR Locate’s collection and processing of data met the conditions set out in the Human Rights Act and in UK data protection legislation.

The ruling is a blow for privacy campaigners, and plenty of people still seem to be worried about facial recognition technology.

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The Ada Lovelace Institute, a technology research firm, today released the results of a survey on public opinion on facial recognition. Completed with global public opinion and data firm YouGov, it found that the majority of people in the UK want government restrictions on police use of AFR. This shows that the court ruling is out of step with public expectations, says the institute’s director Carly Kind.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK data regulation regulator, has also voiced concerns. It recently conducted an investigation into the first police pilots of facial recognition. And in a statement today, it warned that facial recognition has the potential to “undermine rather than enhance confidence in the police”.

“We will now consider the court’s findings in finalising our recommendations and guidance to police forces,” said an ICO spokesperson.

For his part, Bridges intends to appeal the ruling. “This disappointing judgment does not reflect the very serious threat that facial recognition poses to our rights and freedoms,” said Bridges’s lawyer Megan Goulding.

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Today’s judgment only applies to the police, but facial recognition technology is used by other organisations and in various ways. “The issue remains that a good many people are adopting this new technology without… ensuring that they comply appropriately with the requirements of the legislation,” says Will Richmond-Coggan, a data protection litigator at Freeths, a law firm. “That is where privacy is being impacted negatively,” he says.

The ruling also doesn’t address whether the technology should be used, says Kind. “Should this technology be lawful?” she asks. “Should police be allowed to use it to monitor people on a day-to-day basis? Should supermarkets, schools and employers be allowed to use it?”

In light of this, Kind says it would be good for the UK government to engage with the public more broadly on this issue. “We believe the government has a responsibility to reconcile [public expectations and existing regulation], including by undertaking a review of the legal framework governing not only facial recognition technologies but all biometrics technologies,” she says.