Public worried by police and companies sharing biometric data

Conditional trust

Though the research’s survey sample is nationally representative, the authors acknowledged it is skewed towards demographic majority groups, so does not necessarily accommodate concerns held by specific minority demographics.

The researchers also acknowledged the political implications of categorising individuals into demographic groups such as race and gender, as well as the problematic nature of inferring emotions from neurodivergent individuals.

Among public sector organisations, trust in the use of biometric systems varied depending on the purpose. While 85% of people were comfortable with police using facial recognition systems to verify identities at the UK border, just over 60% felt comfortable with these systems being used to identify criminal suspects in a crowd.

Inferential systems used by the police saw a further fall in trust, with less than a third of respondents comfortable with the police using biometric data through means such as polygraphs to determine whether someone might be telling the truth.

Moreover, trust also varied between regions in the UK – only 28% of respondents in Scotland and 11% in Northern Ireland were comfortable with the police sharing information with the private sector, compared with 36% in England and 48% in Wales. The study noted that attitudes towards the police may impact these figures, but that the findings nevertheless highlight that public attitudes to biometrics vary between nations.

In most cases, those opposed to biometric systems called for explicit regulation rather than an outright ban. However, more than half of respondents believed that using biometric systems in job interviews to assess performance (63%) and tracking student or employee engagement (60%) should be banned.

Overall responses to biometrics were positive – more than half of respondents (53%) believed the benefits of biometrics would outweigh the concerns, while nearly a quarter (24%) believed the opposite was true.

Tim Watson, science and innovation director for defence and national security at the ATI, said: “There’s a growing demand to find new ways to protect our personal data due to increasingly sophisticated cyber security threats and identity fraud techniques, and biometrics is likely to play a crucial role.

“We hope that this research will help policymakers to understand where the gaps are and plan accordingly.”

Legal responsibilities

The research comes just two months after a House of Lords committee questioned the legality of live facial recognition (LFR) technology being used by the UK police without proper scrutiny or accountability.

Writing to the home secretary on 27 January 2024, the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee (JHAC) revealed the findings of its investigation into the use of LFR by UK police, noting the lack of rigorous standards or systems of regulation in place to control police use of the technology.

Both Parliament and civil society have repeatedly called for new legal frameworks to govern law enforcement’s use of biometrics, including the UK’s former biometrics commissioner, Paul Wiles; an independent legal review by Matthew Ryder QC; the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission; and the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which called for a moratorium on LFR as far back as July 2019.

In an exclusive interview with Computer Weekly, the outgoing biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner for England and Wales, Fraser Sampson, also highlighted a number of issues with how UK police had approached deploying its facial recognition capabilities, and warned that the future oversight of police tech is at risk as a result of the government’s proposed data reforms.