UK’s mass facial-recognition roll-out alarms rights groups

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

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At London’s Notting Hill Carnival, where two million people are expected to celebrate Afro-Caribbean culture over Sunday and Monday, facial-recognition cameras are being deployed near entrances and exits.

The police said their objective was to identify and intercept wanted individuals by scanning faces in large 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 hotspots 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 the United Kingdom.

Some 4.7 million faces were scanned in 2024 alone, according to the NGO Liberty.

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

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

When a person on a police “watchlist” passes near the cameras, the Al-powered system, often set up in a police van, triggers an alert.

The suspect can then be immediately detained once police checks confirm their identity.