Section:GDN 1N PaGe:6 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 19:59 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Thursday 8 August 2019
(^6) National
Police force’s facial recognition
app is shameful, says Liberty
Ian Sample
Science editor
South Wales police offi cers are to have
a facial recognition app installed on
their phones to identify suspects they
stop in the street without having to
take them to the police station.
The force intends to test the app
over the next three months with 50
offi cers using the technology to con-
fi rm the names of people of interest
who are stopped on routine patrols.
The app would allow offi cers to
run a snapshot of a person through a
database of suspects called a watch-
list and fi nd potential matches even if
the individual gives false or mislead-
ing information.
The move is the latest sign that
police forces in Britain are eager to
embrace the controversial technology,
which has been criticised for infringing
privacy and increasing state powers of
surveillance.
Liberty, the campaign group, called
the announcement “chilling”, adding
it was “shameful” that South Wales
police had chosen to press ahead with
handheld facial recognition systems
even as it faces a court challenge over
the technology.
In May, Liberty brought a legal case
against the force for its recent use of
automated facial recognition on city
streets, at music festivals, and foot-
ball and rugby matches.
“It’s a gross abuse of power for
SWP to roll out routine, on-the-spot
biometric checks, and especially in
circumstances where a person isn’t
suspected of committing any crime
at all. This technology is intrusive,
unnecessary, and has no place on our
streets,” said Hannah Couchman at
Liberty.
South Wales police said that the
technology would secure quicker
arrests and enable offi cers to resolve
cases of mistaken identity without
the need for a trip to the station. The
offi cers testing the app would be under
“careful supervision”, it said.
“This new app means that, with a
single photo, offi cers can easily and
quickly answer the question of, ‘ are
you really the person we are looking
for?’,” said Deputy Chief Constable
Richard Lewis.
He added that offi cers would only
use the technology when it was “both
necessary and proportionate”.
PM and girlfriend on
trend as cohabiting
fi gures rise, says ONS
Amelia Hill
Cohabiting couples such as Boris John-
son and his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds,
are the fastest growing family type
of the past decade, new data has
revealed. Figures from the Offi ce for
National Statistics showed the number
of cohabiting-couple families rose by
25.8% from 2.7 million in 2008 to 3.
million last year.
The traditional household, defi ned
as a married couple with children, is
giving way to cohabiting-couple fam-
ilies and people living on their own,
according to research , with an 8%
increase in the number of families in
the UK between 2008 and 2018, from
17.7 million to 19.1 million.
“The number of families and house-
holds in the UK has continued to rise in
line with the growth of the UK popu-
lation over the past decade. However,
the ways that people live have been
changing,” said Sophie Sanders of the
population statistics division at the
ONS.
“While married couple families
remain the most common, cohabiting
couples are the fastest growing family
type as people increasingly choose to
live together before, or without, get-
ting married,” said Saunders.
The research also found that the
number of same-sex couple families
has grown by more than 50% since
2015. The number of same-sex mar-
riage couple families accounted for
29.4% of all same-sex couple families
in 2018, compared with only 8.9% in
- Same-sex marriage was intro-
duced in March 2014.
“The trends for opposite-sex and
same-sex couple families are going in
opposite directions,” said Saunders.
“The share of opposite-sex married
couple families is decreasing while
opposite-sex cohabiting couple fam-
ilies are increasing, although at a much
slower rate of change than for same-
sex couple families.”
While more than two-thirds of all
families are married with children,
their proportion has declined from
69.1% of all families in 2008 to 67.1%
in 2018.
The proportion of cohabiting couple
families – the second-largest fam-
ily type at 3.4 million (17.9%) – has
increased from 15.3%. The third-larg-
est group are the 2.9 million (15%)
lone-parent families.
But the data also reveals a signifi -
cant increase in the number of people
living alone, surpassing 8 million for
the fi rst time.
This increase, the data showed, has
been driven by increases in women
aged 45 to 64 years and men aged 65
to 74 years living on their own. Those
aged 65 years and over living alone
increased by half a million people to
3.9 million between 2008 and 2018, a
rise of 14.8%.
“Reasons for increases in these age
and sex groups include an increasing
population aged 45 to 64 years, rises
in the proportions who are divorced or
never married and increasing male life
expectancy catching up with female
life expectancy,” said Sanders.
More men under the age of 65 years
and more women over the age of 65
live alone because higher propor-
tions of men than women never marry,
men tend to marry at older ages than
women – and marry women younger
than themselves – while partnership
dissolution often leads to men living
alone without their children.
Experts have warned that many of
the one in eight people aged 16 and
over in England and Wales who are liv-
ing together without being married or
in a civil partnership – a number that
has risen for the past 15 years in a row –
have “severely skewed” expectations
of what will happen if one of them dies.
“Love just isn’t enough. Cohabiting
couples stand to lose it all if the worst
happens: you could be left with noth-
ing,” said Dan Garrett, chief executive
co-founder of Farewill.
According to research by the will
specialists, 24% of British people
wrongly believe that if they were co-
owning a property with their partner
who they were not married to, own-
ership of that property would pass to
them on their partner’s death.
And one in fi ve wrongly believe that
if they have been cohabiting for more
than fi ve years, they will inherit the
entirety of their partner’s estate or
assume executor status.3.4m
The number of cohabiting couple
families in 2018, said the ONS, up
from 2.7 million a decade earlierРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS