By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner
Do we have a right to go missing? The global explosion in surveillance capability has spurred concerns about privacy but are we entitled to go missing if we choose to?
With rights there’s usually something standing in the way like a legal duty or another right that’s in conflict or competition with yours. Take policing. If you decide to go off grid in the UK, the police have no general obligation to look for you but how can they be sure your absence is voluntary and benign? What started out as an exercise of a right may have led to an accident, crime or other subsequent jeopardy. Your disappearance may have been caused by a scam or coercion, or your ‘don’t worry about me’ messages deepfaked. Many before you have gone dark because of what they have done or are planning to do and, in all the above, the police have a duty to look more closely.
Vulnerability (particularly age and mental health) will certainly limit your right to disappear – somewhat ironic because lack of contact is itself now seen as suspicious or abnormal: asserting your right to go missing is proof that you need to be found.
Perhaps going missing is more of a freedom than an entitlement. But what is it that we’re free from? Freedom from being looked for? That brings further restrictions. First, it’s not just the police that can feel an obligation to look for you. Often there are as many reasons to go looking as there are to go missing: remorse, reparation, restitution; inheritance, genealogy, philanthropy; confession and closure. There are charities dedicated both to finding missing people and helping people go missing without causing alarm and there are commercial companies with huge missing persons databases ready to join in. So, we’re probably not free from a lot of well-meaning searching.
Secondly, the grid doesn’t have many off ramps. With technological advancement, finding you is easier than ever, and all the risk lies in not looking for you – the one you decide not to look for will be the one you regret. Finding people has dominated police investment in surveillance technology and the College of Policing for England and Wales even suggested that it would be helpful in finding ‘potential witnesses’ (a wholly indeterminate term which includes everybody). Technology has also severely limited how far you’ll get before triggering something even if its intention wasn’t to find you. There’s an old forensic science acronym ECLAT – every contact leaves a trace – and it’s applicable here: any digital interaction we make will create something findable by someone. Leaving aside obvious things like phone signals, ANPR and other telemetry, bare essentials like ATM withdrawals, cash purchases, accessing services, seeking help and assistance, and communicating with others while roaming freely will be recorded and recoverable.
Thirdly, our obsession with uploading and downloading images of every moment and movement has redefined ‘mass surveillance’. The ability to find specific needles in vast digital haystacks comes, not so much from the state having more cameras, but the fact that we’re all looking at everything and sharing what we see.
The power of this aggregated capability has yet to be measured but there’s no doubting its impact. At the start of this year, police in the West Midlands launched a new appeal to find a woman they had been looking for since 1972 when she went missing at 16 years old. According to the BBC, the police uploaded a photograph on social and were able to confirm she was alive and well after the quick public response. Aggregated surveillance capability allowed the police to locate in a matter of hours someone who had enjoyed a voluntary absence for 52 years. Add open-source data and the ability of the state to shrink our worlds in the pursuit of persons of interest would make Robert Clayton Dean shudder, as the Italian mafia boss on the run for 20 years found out recently after detectives spotted him on Google Street View.
Rights and freedoms have to be weighed against legitimate expectation: is it reasonable to expect to drop off the radar anymore? An expectation of privacy is far from unlimited, but our visibility is almost absolute. In a world where we’re so easily found, a right not to be is like a right to modesty where all clothes are see-through: entirely dependent on no one looking.
All of which presents a big problem when the state needs, not just to respect anonymity, but to guarantee it. For some people, not being found isn’t a privilege, it’s critical and increasingly elusive. Complainants rebuilding their lives after abusive relationships, witnesses in serious organised crime cases, prisoners released after serving sentences for notorious offences, all face significant risk if ‘found’. Undercover law enforcement operatives also fall into this group. Providing new identities was a tactic in the past but has become much harder with biometric proof of ID requirements generally, while the accountability of officers operating behind false identities has raised serious concerns.
As human traceability becomes endemic, other rights become more important. Data rights, protections from covert and directed surveillance, international sharing and storage of images and biometrics are essential for mitigating intrusion. Encryption offers a shield against content interception but ultimately the state has to balance freedoms against the threat of wider harm as Apple are finding out.
Do we have a right – or freedom- to go missing? Possibly, but if you’re thinking of setting off on a voyage of self-discovery without a trace, that ship has already sailed, taking its passenger manifest with it. If you do feel the urge to head out into the world to ‘find yourself’, someone will almost certainly have beaten you to it.
About the author
Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.
Article Topics
biometric identification | biometrics | data privacy | facial recognition | Fraser Sampson | video surveillance
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202503/surveillance-identity-and-the-right-to-go-missing