The future of facial recognition

Sometimes technology and fun collide. Occasionally, literally…

I keep a jet ski on my driveway. It belongs to my mate Chris really, but it looks good on my drive, and the unspoken deal is I get to use it. Win-win.

Last weekend we took it down to Hayling Island with sunny skies, perfect weather, and a plan for our wives and kids to meet us at the beach.

Chris and I navigated out from the harbour and spent the day giving the kids rides. My son James and middle daughter Arya loved it, though you’ve got to keep the speed sensible as they are a couple of daredevils and don’t know when to stop. After three or four runs each, everything was going great.

Then it all went wrong.

We’d stopped about ten metres offshore (can’t go too close to the sand as it’s bad for the ski). I jumped off, Chris jumped on, and asked where the key was. A quick pat-down and a sinking feeling later, we realised it was lost somewhere in the waves. Cue an hour and a half of frantic
phone calls trying to locate a new key, hats off to Jack at Hayling Jetsport Performance Limited for saving the day, not for the first time…

Back out on the water, my luck didn’t exactly improve. I fell off once with Arya, and again with my wife. At that point, I thought we might have been better off without finding the key. Despite aching limbs and battered pride, we had a brilliant day.

On Wednesday, it was back to work and straight into a course on persuasion, influencing, and negotiation at our Wood Green head office. I pity the next supplier I negotiate with..!

Want a tip? The first rule of negotiation isn’t give-and take. It’s actually about creating an immediate deadlock.

Find something your counterpart will say “no” to, then negotiate backwards. It’s counterintuitive, but I’ve learned its works.

While in Wood Green, I spent some time with the Met Police and one of their facial recognition vehicles and its team. It’s impressive tech: an 8k camera up front, a 4k rig on the roof, and legacy gear on the sides, all crunching biometric data live. Parked up in the middle of the town centre, it can instantly match faces to wanted individuals and local police then swiftly intervene.

It made me think: imagine the impact if we could roll this out nationwide. Police reckon they could apprehend people in a day who’d usually take weeks to track down. Think missing persons, terrorists, or banned individuals approaching stadiums or shopping centres. Even private security could leverage this tech, significantly cutting police costs and freeing them to focus resources elsewhere.

I know facial recognition isn’t flawless. Mistakes happen. Just recently a woman was wrongly stopped and banned from a store in a case of mistaken identity. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Human errors occur with or without technology, but the good outweighs
the occasional blip.

We hear horror stories, but if retailers asked their customer base through loyalty schemes, what would they think about facial recognition? It’d be valuable to gauge public sentiment. And I think the majority would be in favour. Because the reality is, crime isn’t going down.

We’ve all heard the adage that insanity is expecting different results while repeating the same behaviours. So yes, technology has its faults, but it’s better than doing nothing.

In the end, whether it’s finding a lost jet ski key or deploying cutting-edge tech, problem-solving and persistence matter.

Even if you fall off once or twice along the way.

Peter Fisher

Director of Risk & Intelligence