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Britain risks drifting into a surveillance society worse than that led by Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984, with cameras that can read lips as people talk on the street, a government watchdog warned today.

Tony Porter, the government’s surveillance camera commissioner, said that people could be left “cupping hands over their mouths” to keep conversations private if nothing was done to control the use of new technology.

He added that cameras capable of identifying people by their walk could be operating soon in a further erosion of personal privacy.

Mr Porter admitted that such technology — with unprecedented capabilities beyond controversial facial-recognition cameras being piloted by the Metropolitan Police — could have important benefits for law enforcement and public safety.

But he warned: “It’s important to protect a free and open society and at the moment we are at risk of ceding that to the impact of technology.

“The capability to run lip-sync technology to determine what people are saying would have a very suppressive effect. It would change the nature of our society. People wouldn’t feel they could have a conversation outside.”

Mr Porter, who made the warning in an interview with the Standard, added: “What it means is a far-reaching, ubiquitous surveillance society where people yield their right to privacy.

“If we don’t accept that things have changed we will have that type of society. We increasingly see the football manager cupping his hand over his mouth to give instructions for fear of being exposed. Just extrapolate that by millions and what it would mean if people knew there was a capability of walking down the town and your lips moving could be picked up and extrapolated into a conversation.

“It’s the 70th year since George Orwell released 1984 and it’s relevant to say we’ve got to listen to those warnings and say we don’t want that society and what do we do about it.” Mr Porter’s comments follow controversy over recent Met trials of facial recognition and the deployment of the technology in the King’s Cross area by the owners of Granary Square, which is being investigated by the information commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

Campaign group Big Brother Watch has claimed the country faces an “epidemic” of facial recognition affecting property developments, shopping centres, museums and casinos.

A potential landmark judgment is awaited in a High Court case brought by campaign group Liberty, which is challenging the use of facial recognition by South Wales Police. But Mr Porter said facial recognition was “almost so yesterday” in comparison to new technologies that could be installed on surveillance cameras.

He added that a key problem was that “overt” cameras such as CCTV and body-worn devices were increasingly likely to have the same intrusive potential as covert cameras used by police and intelligence agencies.

Whereas the latter were governed by a “tight regulatory framework”, the rules governing cameras deployed in public were much less rigorous, something he said needed to change.

“The technology is here, we don’t want to pretend it’s not, but we’ve got to believe that we can get an effective and robust regulatory environment about it,” he said. “With covert surveillance there’s a very tight regulatory lock, but with the type of technology I’m talking about — lip sync, gait technology — none of that falls under this sort of rigour. Given that it is capable of being as invasive as covert surveillance there must at least be a review of how we tolerate this in our society.”

Asked if there was a risk of drifting into a surveillance society more intrusive than the one led by Big Brother in Orwell’s novel, Mr Porter agreed.

He emphasised that new surveillance technology could offer important benefits, including the capability to predict fights or detect explosives. He was also optimistic that ministers were aware of the need to update legislation.

Scotland Yard has defended its use of facial recognition on the grounds that it “has the potential to be invaluable to day-to-day policing”.