Slave to the algo: facial recognition and fraud in a Covid-19 world Keith Oliver is Head of International and Amalia Neenan is Civil Fraud & Commercial Litigation Legal Researcher at Peters & Peters Solicitors LLP Facial recognition software is everywhere - from entering sports stadia to opening up your phone (Photo by Steffi Loos/Getty Images) “There will come a time when it isn’t, ‘they’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be, ‘my phone is spying on me’.” American author, Philip K. Dick, warned us about the rapid advancement of technology. Incredibly, this warning was given long before his death in 1982, when mobile phones were the size of bricks and computers were still shrouded in mysticism. Dick’s prophetic novels have since graced the big screen – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep became Blade Runner, and Tom Cruise showed us the value of a black market in ‘working/reusable eyes’ as the lead in the adaptation of Minority Report. Both of these works depict a world where technology can track our every movement, eliminating privacy as we know it. Sound familiar?