Face-off in Britain over surveillance technology

LONDON: On a grey, cloudy morning in December, London police deployed a state-of-the-art AI powered camera near the railway station in the suburb of Croydon and quietly scanned the faces of the unsuspecting passersby.

The use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology - which creates biometric facial signatures before instantaneously running them through a watchlist of suspects - led to 10 arrests for crimes including threats to kill, bank fraud, theft and possession of a crossbow.

The technology, which was used at the British Grand Prix in July and at King Charles III's coronation in May, has proved so effective in trials that the UK government wants it used more.


"Developing facial recognition as a crime fighting tool is a high priority," policing minister Chris Philp told police chiefs in October, adding that the technology has "great potential".

"Recent deployments have led to arrests that would otherwise have been impossible and there have been no false alerts," he added.

But the call to expedite its roll-out has outraged some parliamentarians, who want the government's privacy regulator to take "assertive, regulatory action" to prevent its abuse.

"Facial recognition surveillance involves the processing, en masse, of the sensitive biometric data of huge numbers of people - often without their knowledge," they wrote in a letter.