UK Gov’t Turning To Facial Recognition Smartwatches To Monitor Convicted Foreigners

To keep an eye on what the UK government considers to be dangerous migrants, it's turning to some questionable tech provided by a company that's long been in the business of tracking people for more altruistic reasons.

Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence will be required to scan their faces up to five times a day using smartwatches installed with facial recognition technology under plans from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

In May, the government awarded a contract to the British technology company Buddi Limited to deliver non-fitted devices" to monitor specific cohorts" as part of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service. The scheme is due to be introduced from the autumn across the UK, at an initial cost of 6m.

This represents a bit of pivot for Buddi Limited, which has previously limited itself to marketing Buddi Clips," a GPS tracking system with built-in fall detection that allows at-risk individuals (like the elderly) to move around freely without worrying they'll go undiscovered if they happen to suffer a debilitating injury. The company doesn't appear to offer a version with built-in facial recognition, so presumably it will be using a third party's AI to perform the mandated check-ins.

Those obliged to wear the devices will need to complete periodic monitoring checks throughout the day by taking a photograph of themselves on a smartwatch, with information including their names, date of birth, nationality and photographs stored for up to six years. Locations will be tracked 24/7, allowing trail monitoring data to be recorded".

Facial photographs taken by Buddi-crafted smartwatches will be checked against images stored by the UK government. And that's where the problems begin.

The program will only be imposed on foreign-national offenders" who have been convicted of a criminal offense. The information provided by the government and the contract documents do not say which criminals will get ankle bracelets and which will be forced to verify themselves using tech that fails most frequently when asked to recognize faces that aren't white and male. Presumably, most foreign nationals in the UK will be of the non-white variety.

There's also no reason to believe this won't be subject to mission creep, moving from targeting only dangerous" foreigners but also asylum seekers and anyone else the government interacts with that the government may feel is worth tracking.

Fortunately, a false negative won't immediately result in deployment of law enforcement. If the face match fails, a manual check" will be performed. What a manual check entails is not detailed in the article or the privacy impact assessment crafted by the UK Home Office.

And, while the Home Office believes privacy will be minimally impacted by 24-hour surveillance that requires periodic facial recognition check-ins, it only believes that because it's necessary to hold that belief while doing the things you want to. It's not as though any government entity anywhere has ever created a privacy impact assessment and then tossed the planned program because it looked like it might impact privacy just a bit too much. The UK government says this is only about foreigners and criminals and neither of those deserve anything less than always-on surveillance until they can safely be ejected from the country.