Privacy

Don’t ever sue anyone! That’s what I would have told Prince Harry, Elton John and their fellow claimants, on the hook for a £34.4 million bill after losing their disastrous privacy case against the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. I trained as a libel barrister in 5 Raymond Buildings, the same chambers as Sir Matthew Nicklin, the judge in the case, and David ‘Orange Sherbet’ Sherborne, Prince Harry’s lawyer. In every libel case I saw as a pupil barrister, I thought it was crazy to sue. Clients risked fortunes for the possibility of minor moral victories. The barristers were certainly affable and bright. Sherborne got a First in Classics from New College, Oxford; Nicklin a First in Law from Newcastle. But, still, it isn’t worth risking millions to avenge an insult.

Britain’s obsession with surveillance is reaching new heights. Several of the UK’s largest retailers have quietly installed facial recognition checkpoints on their doorways and inside their shops. It means that automated identity checks are taking place on our high streets without customers even being aware of it. You won’t be informed if your photo is taken and added to a watchlist, and no police report is required The cameras look like any other CCTV cameras, except they take a biometric scan of every customer’s face, like at a passport e-gate. The facial recognition scans are then compared against a private database run by the software company Facewatch.

In an effort to lower crime rates, American law enforcement is pushing to combine facial recognition with expanded video surveillance. Politicians worried about their re-election chances due to a perceived crime wave see the expansion as necessary. It’s a sharp swing from 2019 and 2020, when cities like San Francisco and New Orleans were banning or at least enacting limits on facial recognition technology due to privacy concerns. Now, New Orleans plans to roll back its facial recognition prohibition. The Virginia State Senate gave law enforcement a late Valentine’s Day gift by passing a facial recognition expansion bill on February 15 — the Democrats who unanimously approved a ban on facial recognition last year suddenly changed their minds, as did five Republicans.

The internet is not a private place, but news outlets have decided that it's up to them to determine when someone loses their right to anonymity. Quite often, the media gets this calculation wrong and destroys lives in the process. Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous blogger behind 'Slate Star Codex', deleted all of the content on his popular website after the New York Times revealed it was going to publish his true identity. In a long post explaining the debacle, Scott Alexander said that he was talking to a Times reporter last week who was planning on writing an article about his blog. The Times reporter apparently discovered Scott Alexander's identity in the course of reporting and cited a 'New York Times policy' requiring him to publish his full name.

Coming soon to as neighborhood near you: cameras everywhere. On every traffic light, intersection, telephone pole and storefront, with tracking software that uses facial, gesture and heartbeat recognition. That identity data is combined with web search history, conversations with Alexa and Siri, Amazon purchases and Twitter. A complete individual profile, with a score measuring social reliability, can be constructed and shared with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.This might sound too dystopian to be true.