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Content type: Long Read
1. What is the issue?Governments and international organisations are developing and accessing databases to pursue a range of vague and ever-expanding aims, from countering terrorism and investigating crimes to border management and migration control.These databases hold personal, including biometric, data of millions if not billions of people, and such data is processed by technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), to surveil, profile, predict future behaviour, and ultimately make…
Content type: Long Read
Elections and political campaigns are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. These technologies rely on collecting, storing, and analysing personal information to operate. They have enabled the proliferation of tailor-made political advertising. The recent proliferation of AI technologies is enabling ever more sophisticated content creation and manipulation in the context of elections.In parallel, governments are continuing to invest in digital technologies for the running of elections…
Content type: Long Read
As more and more of us feel compelled to cover our faces with masks, companies that work on facial recognition are confronted with a new challenge: how to make their products relevant in an era where masks have gone from being seen as the attribute of those trying to hide to the accessory of good Samaritans trying to protect others.
Facewatch is one of those companies. In May 2020, they announced they had developed a new form of facial recognition technology that allows for the…
Content type: Long Read
Over the last two decades we have seen an array of digital technologies being deployed in the context of border controls and immigration enforcement, with surveillance practices and data-driven immigration policies routinely leading to discriminatory treatment of people and undermining peoples’ dignity.
And yet this is happening with little public scrutiny, often in a regulatory or legal void and without understanding and consideration to the impact on migrant communities at the border and…
Content type: Long Read
The UK’s Metropolitan Police have began formally deploying Live Facial Recognition technology across London, claiming that it will only be used to identify serious criminals on “bespoke ‘watch lists’” and on “small, targeted” areas.
Yet, at the same time, the UK’s largest police force is also listed as a collaborator in a UK government-funded research programme explicitly intended to "develop unconstrained face recognition technology", aimed “at making face…