If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know about the Iron Law of Data Collection. Briefly, the law says that anytime data is collected
- No matter the rationale and promises about the data collection and the purposes to which it will be put, it will invariably find new uses as interested parties demand access to it.
- Eventually, the data will be abused.
Usually when I write about the Iron Law it’s after the fact: the data has been collected and the mission creep and abuse have already begun. This time, the London Metropolitan Police has provided us with an opportunity to test the law ab initio. The Met has announced plans to implement facial recognition cameras on London’s streets as part of a plan to catch serious criminals.
Civil libertarians are not amused but despite their vigorous objections the Met is going ahead with its plans. They claim the system is 70% accurate so, apparently, there’s no reason for alarm. Independent studies of the system, however, found it to be about 19% accurate.
That’s one data point. Here’s another:
The Met has made promises to the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, after an
independent ethics review raised concerns over its earlier trials of
facial recognition software. The system will not be linked to other
official databases.
That very specific. We will not make this data available to be used with other databases. The Iron Law predicts that of course it will be made available to those other databases eventually and that it will be abused by, say, being used to identify law abiding citizens legally protesting government actions. Time will tell, of course, but I know which way I’m betting.