Britain's Mass Facial Recognition Roll-Out Alarms Rights Groups

They say it is invasive, a breach of rights; police say it is good for catching offenders

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LONDON - Outside supermarkets or in festival crowds, millions are now having their features scanned by real-time facial recognition systems in Britain — the only European country to deploy the technology on a large scale.

At London's Notting Hill Carnival, where two million people are expected to celebrate Afro-Caribbean culture over Aug 24 to 25, facial recognition cameras have been deployed near entrances and exits.

The police said their objective was to identify and intercept wanted individuals by scanning faces in crowds and comparing them with thousands of suspects already in the police database.

The technology is "an effective policing tool which has already been successfully used to locate offenders at crime hot spots, resulting in well over 1,000 arrests since the start of 2024", said Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley.

The technology was first tested in 2016 and its use has increased considerably over the past three years in Britain.

Some 4.7 million faces were scanned in 2024 alone, according to the non-governmental organisation Liberty.

British police have deployed the live facial recognition system around 100 times since late January, compared with only 10 between 2016 and 2019.

Examples include before two Six Nations rugby games and outside two Oasis concerts in Cardiff in July.