Engineering & Technology have announced that South Wales Police will once again target football fans with facial-recognition cameras at the Cardiff City Stadium on Sunday 12 January.This is not the first time police have used this technology, neither is it the first time fans have protested, with the first instance taking place last October.
Facial recognition software is still very much in its early stages of production and there are many instances of it making mistakes or false positives still. Furthermore, standard data breaches are still commonplace so if people’s faces are stored with other personal data, it will make such imagery just as vulnerable yet even more desirable to criminal hackers.
Something needs to be done in such large gatherings of people but until such a system is in place that can be completely trusted in terms of security and it’s function, I think it could do more harm than good.