Facial recognition… coming to a supermarket near you

Like most retail owners, he'd had problems with shoplifting – largely carried out by a relatively small number of repeat offenders. Then a year or so ago, exasperated, he installed something called Facewatch. It's a facial-recognition system that watches people coming into the store; it has a database of "subjects of interest" (SOIs), and if it recognises one, it sends a discreet alert to the store manager. "If someone triggers the alert," says Paul, "they're approached by a member of management, and asked to leave, and most of the time they duly do." Facial recognition, in one form or another, is in the news most weeks at the moment. Recently, a novelty phone app, FaceApp, which takes your photo and ages it to show what you'll look like in a few decades, caused a public freakout when people realised it was a Russian company and decided it was using their faces for surveillance.