MPs condemn Frasers Group’s use of facial recognition cameras in stores

theguardian.com:

Almost 50 MPs and peers have written to Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group, the corporate owner of the tycoon’s retail portfolio including House of Fraser and Sports Direct, condemning the use of “live facial recognition” cameras in the group’s stores.

Describing the technology as “invasive and discriminatory”, the parliamentarians, a cross-party collection including David Davis, John McDonnell and Tim Farron, have urged the group to end the use of the cameras across the country.

“Live facial recognition [LFR] technology has well-evidenced issues with privacy, inaccuracy, and race and gender discrimination. LFR inverts the vital democratic principle of suspicion preceding surveillance and treats everyone who passes the camera like a potential criminal,” the letter argues.

“The technology obtains the facial biometric data – information as sensitive as a fingerprint – of every customer entering the store to check them against your privately created watchlist. This is the equivalent of performing an identity check on every single customer.”

The letter, which was coordinated and co-signed by the privacy groups Big Brother Watch, Liberty and Privacy International, argues that as well as being wrong on principle, facial recognition technology is also “inaccurate and ineffective”. “To date, 87% of alerts generated by the Metropolitan police’s own live facial recognition system have been inaccurate. The poor accuracy of LFR technology also disproportionately impacts people of colour and women.”

Speaking to the Guardian, Davis said: “There are no rules: this is open season on privacy. Just this month, there was a case of Tesla employees getting into trouble because they were misusing photographs from inside the cars. It’s a good