The Metropolitan Police Service is facing fresh scrutiny over its use of a controversial facial recognition search tool after leading human rights and privacy groups demanded an investigation by the data protection watchdog.
Campaigners are calling on the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to investigate whether officers breached data protection laws by accessing the PimEyes website thousands of times from Met computers.
PimEyes allows users to upload an individual’s photograph and find matches for that person across the internet.
A joint investigation by i and Liberty Investigates previously revealed that the search engine, which has been described by senior MPs as “invasive and dangerous”, was visited 2,337 times from Met computers in a 90-day period this year.
The Met, along with other UK police forces, already has access to facial recognition software capable of matching images of suspects with official databases.
But unlike those tools, PimEyes could be used by an officer or staff member without an official audit trail of searches or safeguards around which images are submitted.
The Met said that the online “hits” do not mean that the site was used by officers to carry out searches, and claimed that officers may have visited PimEyes “for a number of reasons”, including press reports about the software.
The coalition of 16 campaign groups, which includes Big Brother Watch, Amnesty International, Liberty, End Violence Against Women, and the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, described this response as “unconvincing”.
The Met has since confirmed that it has blocked all access to PimEyes from its devices. But the true extent and nature of use by police in Britain of the search tool, which claims to be able to search through billions of images, is unknown.
A separate Freedom of Information request by Liberty Investigates to all 45 of the main UK forces, including the Met, to disclose how many searches were performed using PimEyes was either declined or went unanswered.
In their letter to Information Commissioner John Edwards, the campaign groups called for an investigation, saying the ability to access the PimEyes site from Metropolitan Police Service computers “represents a serious failure of oversight, and is likely to be unlawful under data protection law”.
The campaigners said there were “reasonable” grounds for assuming that at least some of the visits to the PimEyes site had been to carry out searches of members of the public.
They pointed to the findings of the Casey Review, carried out in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens, as grounds for investigating the nature of any such searches.
The letter to Mr Edwards said: “We have serious concerns that police officers could be exploiting this technology to track victims, witnesses and suspects, absent of scrutiny and for their own purposes.”
The Met was contacted for comment.
PimEyes, which is based in Tbilisi, Georgia, does not throw up results from social media and video platforms.
But using artificial intelligence to map facial proportions and features, it can pinpoint where photos of an individual appear on company websites, news articles, blog posts or any other site on the open internet.
The company says its search tool is “not intended for the surveillance of others” and that it has introduced safeguards which flag when male users carry out high numbers of searches of female images.
It says the system has allowed thousands of women to tackle revenge porn by locating photographs of them on the internet and then having them taken down.
But critics say its search returns could provide details such as the name or workplace of an individual, potentially furnishing stalkers with information about their victims.
‘Gravely concerned’
In a separate letter to the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, Sir Mark Rowley, the campaigners said they were “gravely concerned” at the potential use of the PimEyes system by officers without scrutiny or an audit trail, adding that the public have a right to know how the search engine was used by the service.
In a series of questions to Sir Mark, the privacy groups asked whether the search tool had played any role in investigations or the arrest of suspects.
Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at Big Brother Watch, said there was a need to “rein in” use of facial recognition technologies by police.
She told i: “The Metropolitan Police have serious questions to answer about their officers accessing this dangerous stalkerware. They must come clean about who was using this facial recognition search engine and for what purpose, and the Information Commissioner must investigate to ensure this cannot happen again.”
The Met is one of the first forces in Britain to make regular use of authorised facial recognition technology as a crimefighting tool.
Live facial recognition systems, which use cameras to scrutinise passers-by in a public area to see if they match a “bespoke watchlist” of wanted individuals, are now regularly deployed at locations from shopping centres to football matches, alongside signage informing people that the technology is in use.
Last week, the Government announced an extra £547,000 in funding for the Met’s live facial recognition programme.
Since the beginning of the year, the tools have resulted in more than 100 arrests in a single London borough, including that of an alleged double rapist.
The Yard said it would respond to the campaigners’ letter “in due course”. A spokesperson added: “The Met Police has clear policies and procedures in place to govern the use of any facial recognition service that may be used to support investigations. Since this access has been flagged, we have strengthened existing safeguards and have now blocked access to the PimEyes site on Met devices.”
Giorgi Gobronidze, the owner and chief executive of PimEyes, told i the search engine operates through “precise photographic analysis” rather than biometric data and only provides links to publicly available material rather than storing images.
He said: “Our terms of service specify that users should engage with PimEyes solely for private, personal, and legitimate consumer purposes… We have implemented robust safeguard mechanisms, including systems designed to detect suspicious activity and prevent misuse. This includes preventing the use of shared accounts and searches related to children.”
Last year, after the ICO declined to take action over a previous legal complaint, a group of MPs and peers wrote to Mr Edwards calling for PimEyes to be banned from open web access and its use restricted to vetted organisations.
This would include law enforcement agencies such as the Met, but would require scrutiny and regulation of officers’ use of the technology.
Former cabinet minister David Davis said that access to an “unregulated” facial recognition system by police “should never have been allowed in the first place”.
The ICO said it was ready to review information relating to PimEyes after last year considering a complaint from Big Brother Watch. A spokesperson said: “We can confirm we have received a further letter from Big Brother Watch and we are assessing the information provided.”
