Facial Recognition – What Does the Future Hold?

If you based your view only on what is reported in the press, it would be easy to get the impression that facial recognition technology is universally mistrusted and disliked. The truth is a little more complicated. According to the Information Commissioner’s June 2021 report on facial recognition in public spaces 82% of the public support police use of such technology. By contrast, between a third and half of those polled supported the use of the technology by entertainment venues and retailers. There was particularly low support for purposes like tracking shopper behaviour (7%) or making offers to customers based on facial profile (26%).

 As the Commissioner states, this reflects a “nuanced” view being taken by the public in relation to this technology. It is clear that the technology itself is not objectionable, - provided that a genuine benefit can be demonstrated and, she argues, where it is clear that there isn’t a less intrusive way of achieving the same result.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in connection with security around mobile devices. Since its widespread introduction, there has been a rapid take up of biometric recognition technologies (fingerprint, face or voice recognition) as a mechanism for securing and unlocking smartphones. Mercator Advisory Group have been collecting data on this for a few years now. In 2019 only 27% of phone users used biometrics to verify their identity, of which only 11% of that was accounted for by face recognition. By 2020, 41% of phones were being unlocked with biometrics and by 2024 Mercator projects that two thirds of smartphone users will use biometrics to authenticate identity. In 2020, half of those using biometrics for authentication were using face or voice recognition (30% and 20% respectively).

What we can see from this is that security and convenience are the twin factors that drive adoption of this technology, and user comfort with its deployment. It is no coincidence that there are a number of schemes currently being developed to use facial recognition in airports. These are one of the most high security environments that many civilians will enter, but also an area which has historically suffered from substantial delays (and consequent inconvenience) to a visitor’s journey through the airport, as a result of those stringent security requirements

While understandable caution remains about the “normalisation” of surveillance, this research and the ICO’s report more generally will provide encouragement for those who are developing the technology, and for those who are thinking about deploying it. With the publication of the ICO’s report there is at least the sense of some structured guidance emerging which will enable developers, manufacturers and their customers to understand what is expected of them.

Will Richmond-Coggan is a director in the data protection team at Freeths LLP, with nearly two decades of experience in the field. He specialises in advising data controllers and technology developers (including those working with facial recognition) on a wide spectrum of contentious and non-contentious data protection and privacy matters.