GOVERNMENT PLANS to use smartwatch facial recognition technology to track and gather data on migrants in the UK has sparked concern among civil liberties and human rights experts, who fear it will result in black and ethnic minority communities being unfairly targeted and criminalised.

Tech company Buddi Limited has been awarded a £6 million contract to deliver “non-fitted devices” to monitor “specific cohorts”, as part of plans to be rolled out by the Home Office and Ministry of Justice in autumn, to monitor migrants convicted of criminal offences.

The government has already deployed GPS ankle tags on migrants released from detention. The roll-out of smartwatches will also record subjects’ GPS location 24/7, on top of requiring them to scan their faces up to five times a day.

Lucie Audibert, legal officer for Privacy International, told The Voice: “This is particularly concerning for a large proportion of migrants who are not white. Facial recognition is a dangerous, discriminatory tech – it regularly misidentifies people of colour and is disproportionately used against minorities.”

“It feels like a step closer to branding people according to their nationality.  This must be strongly resisted.”

Hilary Brown, human rights lawyer

She added: “This is the latest stride in the UK’s journey to complete disregard for the human rights of migrants. Facial recognition algorithms are usually trained on non-representative datasets of faces, and their design is often infused with existing racial biases – meaning that non-white people are more often misidentified.

“This will inevitably cause additional levels of anxiety to non-white people who have to wear these smartwatches, and to false allegations and excessive enforcement against them. These £6m going to Buddi Limited would be better spent on support for vulnerable migrants, clearing the backlog of immigration applications, and integration policies.”

A human rights lawyer told The Voice the move risked “branding people according to their nationality.”

Hilary Brown, CEO of Virgo Consultancy Services Ltd, said: “Although I agree that the government should do more to provide alternatives to detention, this idea is degrading and inhumane.  The technology to date has proved to be unreliable dependent on satellite and Wi-Fi connection, so would they then be visited by the Immigration Authority and detained for failing to comply with the conditions if the signal fails?”

She added: “This creates more logistical problems than it solves. It feels like a step closer to branding people according to their nationality. This must be strongly resisted.”

In recent weeks experts and the public have also voiced fears about government plans to scrap the Human Rights Act, which is viewed as an important legal tool in holding the government and institutions to account amid increasing state surveillance. 

The government’s new plan, to adopt facial recognition technology to keep tabs on foreign nationals, will likely add to those concerns, particularly prevalent among Britain’s black and minority communities. 

The Home Office claim, that the smartwatch program will be used for foreign national offenders, and not for potential asylum seekers although in practice there will be little difference between wearing a fitted GPS tracking device and a smartwatch.  

Under the plans, those fitted with smartwatches would likely be expected to upload photographs of their face, while data collected could be held for several years and shared between police, the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office.

The Home Office has been approached for comment.