Standards Development

Scope

This British Standard provides technical and operational recommendations for the ethical use and deployment of Automated Facial Recognition (AFR) and associated technologies used for live or retrospective overt video surveillance purposes by both private and public organizations. This British Standard is applicable to AFR users and system owners, as well as suppliers and procurers, taking into account how data is captured, viewed, stored and used securely. Recommendations will include the governance and ethics of consent, auto-enrolment and legitimate interests. It will also cover camera placement and functionality, performance measurements, proportionality, manual intervention and operator training.

This British Standard excludes the use of AFR in covert surveillance scenarios, such as those regulated by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA).

Note to P&A: Examples where AFR might be used include, night-time economy (e.g. licenced premises), access control of private and public spaces (e.g. shopping centres, access control for corporations, retail outlets)

Purpose

The use of AFR for purposes of identification has resulted in some high-profile legal challenges, with accusations of infringements of civil liberty. Although concerns have been around the ability of the technology to ‘profile’ people based on gender, racial or other discriminatory grounds.

Such challenges have identified a lack of ethical and legal control mechanisms and the perception that the technology only provides negative outcomes. There are some key advantages in using the technology, which can identify missing people, identify known terrorists, contribute to crowd safety and grant correct access to secure places, phones, and other IT equipment’s.

The evolution of the technology will result in increased and more diverse use, so it is important that a standard exists for its application use around the ethical and legal aspects.

The Standard seeks to set out the key ethical considerations of using the technology, including:

- assessing the need for AFR

- types of AFR technology

– Verification, Identification & Classification

- governance & compliance

- operational requirements

- data privacy

- storage & retention

– use of reference databases

- use of Algorithms and performance with respect to particular demographics

The standard will take account of current legislative frameworks relevant to AFR and build on work in this area from the Biometric & Surveillance Camera Commissioner and the Information Commissioner Office