This week The Guardian revealed that the Minister for Policing Chris Philip and other senior figures of the Home Office had held a closed-door meeting with Simon Gordon, the founder of Facewatch, a leading facial recognition retail security company, in March. The main outcome of the meeting was that the government would lobby the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on the benefits of using live facial recognition (LFR) technologies in retail settings. LFR involves hooking up facial recognition cameras to databases containing photos of people. Images from the cameras can then be screened against those photos to see if they match.

The lobbying effort was apparently successful. Just weeks after reaching out to the ICO, the ICO sent a letter to Facewatch affirming that the company “has a legitimate purpose for using people’s information for the detection and prevention of crime” and that its services broadly comply with UK Data Protection laws, which the Sunak government and UK intelligence agencies are trying to gut. As the Guardian report notes, “the UK’s data protection and information bill proposes to abolish the role of the government-appointed surveillance camera commissioner along with the requirement for a surveillance camera code of practice.”

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It is not just retailers that are making ample use of LFR technologies; so, too, is the British police. As I reported in my book Scanned, law enforcement agencies in the UK, specifically London’s Metropolitan Police Service and South Wales Police, and the US have been trialling live facial recognition (LFR) in public places for a number of years. LFR has been used in England and Wales for a number of events including protests, concerts, the Notting Hill Carnival and also on busy thoroughfares such as Oxford Street in London.

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The UK is already one of the most surveilled nations on the planet. By 2019, it was home to more than 6 million surveillance cameras – more per citizen than any other country in the world, except China, according to Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch.

Until now, the police’s use of LFR has been pretty much covert and each time information has leaked out about that use, there has been a public outcry; now, it is becoming overt. Policing Minister Chris Philip is encouraging police forces across the country to make use of LFR for routine law enforcement, as reports an article by BBC Science Focus.

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The Home Office’s recommendations for much broader use of LFR contradicts the findings of a recent study by Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, at the University of Cambridge, which concluded that LFR should be banned from use in streets, airports and any public spaces – the very places where police believe it would be most valuable.

Unsurprisingly, consumer groups and privacy advocates are up in arms. The civil liberties and privacy campaigning organisation Big Brother Watch has organised an online petition to call on Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley to stop the Met from using LFR. As of writing, the petition is on the verge of reaching its target number (45,000 signatures).

“Live facial recognition is a dystopian mass surveillance tool that turns innocent members of the public into walking ID cards,” says Mark Johnson.