DVLA photos to be used by police
The police will be able to run facial recognition searches on the DVLA’s database of 50 million images used to issue driving licences in the UK.
New legislation making its way through Parliament would provide them with the powers to put a name to an image collected from CCTV or social media etc by searching driving licence records for a match.
According to privacy campaigners, this single clause in a new criminal justice bill, could put every driver in the country in a permanent police identification parade.
Facial recognition searches match the biometric measurements of an identified photograph, such as that contained on driving licences, to those of an image picked up elsewhere.
The intention to allow the police or the National Crime Agency (NCA) to exploit the UK’s driving licence records is not explicitly referenced in the bill or in its explanatory notes, raising criticism from leading academics that the government is “sneaking it under the radar”.
Access to driving licence records is controlled under regulations related to the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, which requires the police to provide a good cause relating to a contravention of mainly road traffic acts. Once the criminal justice bill is enacted, the home secretary, must establish “driver information regulations” to enable the searches, but he will need only to consult police bodies, according to the bill.
Police are increasingly using live facial recognition, which compares a live camera feed of faces against a database of known identities, at major public events such as protests.
Previous complaints about facial recognition systems have suggested that the technology was prone to falsely identifying black and Asian faces.
The EU had considered making images on its member states’ driving licence records available on the Prüm crime fighting database. The proposal was dropped earlier this year as it was said to represent a disproportionate breach of privacy.
The government scrapped the role of the commissioner for the retention and use of biometric material and the office of surveillance camera commissioner this summer, leaving ministers without an independent watchdog to scrutinise such legislative changes.
This comes at a time when the Information Commissioner has applied for permission to appeal the decision by the First Tier Tribunal (Information Rights) in favour of the private sector facial recognition company Clearview AI. The Tribunal found that its application of facial recognition using a database containing 30mn images taken without the data subjects’ consent was lawful overturning a £7.5mn fine. But the ICO is taking the decision to a higher court.