Hamburg commission objects to the use of facial scans by police

A data protection commission from Hamburg, the Hamburgische Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit, believes that the Hamburg police should stop applying and using facial recognition software.

• German professor Johannes Caspar, an official of the Hamburg regulator, has officially objected to the use of facial recognition software. According to him, there is no legal basis for the identification technique. Politicians now have four weeks to respond and comply with the demands, otherwise it is likely to end up in a lawsuit.

It concerns the software Videmo 360. This is facial recognition software that the Hamburg police used during the G20 summit in 2017. The police combined 17TB of photos and videos in a database. This data came from multiple sources: video recordings from various train stations, police’s own photos, material uploaded by private individuals and photos from various media. The software of the company Videmo processes the biometric characteristics, creating templates of the faces.

According to the supervisor, this database is used by the police if there are indications that someone has committed an offence. Caspar believes that this creates a new dimension in the form of extensive control options for the authorities. He argues that wherever visual material from public space is available, Videmo 360 can provide extensive profiling of people. He believes that the collection of data for a period of a few days and the storage for an indefinite period of time requires a special, now missing legal provision.

Police do not appear to have any plans to stop using the facial recognition software for the time being. Speaking to the website Taz, a spokesman for the Hamburg police says that the German Code of Criminal Procedure forms the legal basis for evaluating the footage. According to the spokesperson, this can be regarded as a general investigative act, in which the software is only a tool.