Quick, cheap to make and loved by police – facial recognition apps are on the rise John Naughton

Way back in May 2011, Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, said that the rapid development of facial recognition technology had been one of the things that had surprised him most in a long career as a computer scientist. But its "surprising accuracy" was "very concerning". Questioned about this, he said that a database using facial recognition technology was unlikely to be a service that the company would create, but went on to say that "some company … is going to cross that line". As it happens, Dr Schmidt was being economical with the actualité, as the MP Alan Clark used to say. He must surely have known that a few months earlier Facebook had announced that it was using facial recognition in the US to suggest names while tagging photos.