Police use of live facial recognition scans more than doubled last year

Police believe live facial recognition cameras could become "commonplace" in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned doubling to nearly 5m in the last year.

- Daniel Boffey Mark Wilding

An investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates has highlighted how quickly the technology is becoming a staple of British policing. Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches.

Live facial recognition involves matching faces caught on surveillance cameras against a watchlist in real time, in what campaigners liken to continual fingerprinting of members of the public as they go about their lives. Retrospective facial recognition software is used to match images on databases with those caught on CCTV and other systems.

According to a funding document drawn up by South Wales police as part of a proposal to put the West End of London or Cardiff railway station under live facial recognition cameras, it is believed "the use of this technology could become commonplace in our city centres and transport hubs around England and Wales". The document was released by the Metropolitan police under the Freedom of Information Act.