I was going to state that I had read from a differently biased news source that nobody had been arrested, but the telegraph hasn't really reported it any differ

I was going to state that I had read from a differently biased news source that nobody had been arrested, but the telegraph hasn't really reported it any differently to any other news outlet and contains this: > It also said no-one had been arrested after an incorrect match. Perhaps the real story here is that a system correctly identified 173 correct matches and that the police force clearly double-checked. That almost seems like an appropriate use of the technology. Now, there is highly likely to be a desire to improve the precision. I think this may be where the problems arise. Let's say the system only had false-positive rate of 10%. An officer arresting people based on the information is likely going to become complacent and assume that the system is much more likely to be correct than wrong. It gets worse the better the false-positive rate gets. Where my deep concerns are with such systems is that there is going to be a very strong temptation for the providers of such technology to store the false positives -- by definition not the people you thought they were and who will unlikely have given their consent -- in order to improve the precision and therefore their product. As there is effectively a wholesale opt-out of the GDPR for activities of the state at the cost of passing yet another ill-conceived law (to provide a lawful purpose or legal requirement) then there is no real reason why this won't be done. Such behaviour will lead to companies which effectively become privatised portions of the state with no viable competition -- their data is their secret that keeps them the only viable choice, and when they have precision at 95% and as a competitor you can only dream of having precision of 25%, then it seems somewhat unlikely that anybody would choose to use the other system at any price. As a competitor you will not have the lawful purpose unless working with a police force, which is unlikely with precision at 25%.