IT'S supposed to be the sedate home of book lovers, coffee drinkers and the chattering classes, but Borders, the high street bookseller, has been attacked by human rights organisations for using high-tech surveillance equipment to spy on their customers.
The company is to become the first retailer in the world to introduce a controversial security scheme, normally used to trap football hooligans, paedophiles and terrorists, to photograph customers as they enter stores.
SmartFace -- known as FaceIt in the USA -- keeps a database of 'unique digital face-maps' that will check customers' pictures against those of known shoplifters.
The advanced CCTV technology can locate individual faces within crowds, track a targeted face and then match it against images of suspected criminals kept on its database.
The American-based retailer has 11 outlets in the UK, including stores in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Only UK stores are participating in the SmartFace pilot.
Borders has already been criticised in the UK for its attitude to unions. Marketing itself as laid-back and hip, it has been accused of operating a vigorous anti-union policy.
In America, the company used the union-busting legal firm, Jackson, Lewis, Schnitzler & Krupman to fight bitter campaigns to destabilise unions. This included sacking activists and threatening to close stores if workers joined unions.
The SmartFace technology is manufactured by Visionics, a major player in American surveillance technology. It is used by the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service to check for illegal immigrants trying to cross the Mexican border, by the Israeli Army on the Gaza Strip, and at Iceland's Keflavik airport to seek out known terrorists. The US Army Research Laboratory ranked the technology top of their list of face recognition systems.
SmartFace has already come up against strong opposition in the US. On Thursday a city councillor in Jacksonville, Florida began a legal bid to stop local law-enforcement agencies using the technology, claiming it breaches privacy laws.
The system is already used by South Wales Police to spot football hooligans who are banned from attending matches. In the London Borough of Newham, which has 300 cameras linked to a database, the council claims that SmartFace has helped to achieve a 34% drop in crime since its installation in 1998. Tony Blair gave the scheme his stamp of approval when he visited the borough last year.
Rosemarie McIlwhan, director of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, was appalled by the move by Borders, saying: 'I can see why they don't want shoplifters in their store, but I would question whether this is proportionate to what they are trying to do.
'We are talking about having a bank of pictures of everyone going into the shop -- I would consider that a serious breach of privacy. There is no control over what they do with those pictures, or how they are kept -- are they safe? Nor is there much control over whether Borders could sell the information on, or whether people will actually know this is happening.'
Images that are not matched on the database are discarded after they have been run through a complex matching process, using 80 facial features. Visionics claims its match rate can be more than 99%.
As a private company Borders cannot be prosecuted if it breaches human rights legislation. If it were to breach a citizen's human rights then the British government would have to answer the case in Strasbourg for not protecting human rights sufficiently under UK law.
Roger Bingham, spokesman for the human rights group Liberty, reacted angrily to Borders' security proposal, saying: 'Anyone who wants to know if their image is on a system such as this is able under the Data Protection Act to request that information. We have to know if the company is going to have a system ready to cope with that. I'm inclined, not being a shoplifter, just not to shop there.'
Theft from book retailers is currently booming. Sydney Davies, trade and industry manager of the Booksellers Association, said: 'Customer theft is certainly the biggest problem that book retailers have in terms of crime. Most of the efforts used to combat theft concentrate on tagging books, and having security guards and CCTV in store, so the SmartFace system is certainly a new thing.'
Last year British retailers spent £626 million on crime prevention, and theft from stores reached a staggering £746m, equating to a cost of £85 for each household in the country. David Southwell of the British Retail Consortium said that new technology was one of many ways these costs could be reduced. 'When new technology becomes available it can play a very significant role in reducing shop theft,' he said, 'but there is no single magic bullet in terms of shoplifting that is going to eradicate this very serious problem.
'The investment in shop technology to reduce theft is going to continue to rise. Retailers will use new technology but will also stick with traditional methods such as store detectives to reduce crime.'
A spokeswoman for Borders UK confirmed that the pilot scheme was going ahead in two London stores. She denied that SmartFace was a step too far in monitoring potential shoplifters.
'It is very difficult to distinguish one face from another with the human eye,' she said. 'If the system infringes on anyone's human rights then Borders wouldn't be using it.'
A spokeswoman from Borders' company headquarters in Michigan said the organisation was waiting for confirmation from the British distributors of SmartFace -- Dectel -- that their technology is within the limits of the UK Data Protection Act and EU human rights legislation. She said: 'Borders will now have to validate Dectel's assurances.'
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