We’ve been warning about this moment since the first day TruePublica went online. We said that the government would eventually take the biometric data of every single citizen living in Britain and use it for nefarious reasons.  DNA, fingerprint, face, and even voice data will be included. But that’s not all. The excuse to be used, as ever, will be national security or terrorism, despite the huge fall in fatalities from terrorism and terror-related incidents since the 1970s.

 

Apart from crime-fighting, the Home Office also proposes in its long-awaited report that it will use the centralized database for vetting migrants on the streets and borders of Britain. Not for the first time, civil rights groups argue that systems such as face recognition is faulty, dubiously legal, and collected without public consent. The outcry over Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the EU referendum should, if nothing else, confirm that bulk data collection, used without either public debate or a legal basis is emphatically against our civil liberties.