Facial recognition cameras being used near Arsenal's Emirates Stadium in north London before a match last month. Facial recognition cameras being used near Arsenal's Emirates Stadium in north London before a match last month. Calls for review after technology found to return more false positives for'some demographic groups' on certain settings Fri 5 Dec 2025 06.11 ESTLast modified on Fri 5 Dec 2025 06.57 Ministers are facing calls for stronger safeguards on the use of facial recognition technology after the Home Office admitted it is more likely to incorrectly identify black and Asian people than their white counterparts on some settings. Following the latest testing conducted by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of the technology's application within the police national database, the Home Office said it was "more likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its search results".

Experts have warned of a'frightening expansion' of'Orwellian' technology as the government expands the use of live facial recognition across the country. Ten vans equipped with facial recognition cameras will be deployed across seven police forces – Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire. The Home Office maintains that this technology will only be used to catch'high–harm' offenders with rules to ensure'safeguards and oversight'. According to the government, the technology has already been used to make 580 arrests in London over the last year, including 52 registered sex offenders. However, rights groups have raised concerns that the unprecedented rollout of this surveillance technology risks becoming overly intrusive.

The future is coming at Croydon fast. It might not look like Britain's cutting edge but North End, a pedestrianised high street lined with the usual mix of pawn shops, fast-food outlets and branded clothing stores, is expected to be one of two roads to host the UK's first fixed facial recognition cameras. Digital photographs of passersby will be silently taken and processed to extract the measurements of facial features, known as biometric data. They will be immediately compared by artificial intelligence to images on a watchlist. Alerts can lead to arrests.

Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become "commonplace" in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing. Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British 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 the matching of faces caught on surveillance camera footage against a police watchlist in real time, in what campaigners liken to the continual finger printing of members of the public as they go about their daily lives. Retrospective facial recognition software is used by the police to match images on databases with those caught on CCTV and other systems.

South Wales Police have revealed plans to deploy live facial recognition cameras in Cardiff during this year's Six Nations rugby internationals. The cameras will be placed at'key points' across the city centre, and will alert officers to anyone who is on a predetermined watchlist. The force claims that the cameras will help to'keep visitors safe'. 'The expansion of facial recognition cameras around the city centre really enhances our ability to keep visitors safe from harm,' said Trudi Meyrick, Assistant Chief Constable. 'Our priority is to keep the public safe and this technology helps us achieve that.'

Kate Osamor, the Labour MP for Edmonton, recently received an email from a charity about a constituent of hers who had had her benefits suspended apparently without reason. "For well over a year now she has been trying to contact DWP [the Department for Work and Pensions] and find out more about the reason for the suspension of her UC [Universal Credit], but neither she nor our casework team have got anywhere," the email said. "It remains unclear why DWP has suspended the claim, never mind whether this had any merit … she has been unable to pay rent for 18 months and is consequently facing eviction proceedings." Osamor has been dealing with dozens of such cases in recent years, often involving Bulgarian nationals. She believes they have been victims of a semi-automated system that uses an algorithm to flag up potential benefits fraud before referring those cases to humans to make a final decision on whether to suspend people's claims.

Apple's got a new helpful feature called "Safety Check" that'll guide you through what you've shared, with whom and how to revoke access. If you ever felt like someone was tracking you, be sure to review these settings. Are you concerned about facial recognition cameras monitoring your every move? Some large venues and arenas are using it as a security measure, claiming it ensures safety for guests and employees. However, the technology is also being used for surveillance and to block people from entering businesses.

What if simple face paint could fool some of the best facial recognition tools available at the Qatar World Cup? A team at creative agency Virtue Worldwide sought to answer that question with a project called Camoflags: AI-generated, Juggalo-inspired face paint designs that could be used to evade facial recognition cameras. The experiment is uniquely suited to the World Cup, as face paint is a common feature at soccer matches for fans showing support for their teams. The Qatar World Cup, which ends on December 18, has been criticized for its approach to security, with concerns that the event could become a hotbed for espionage and that visitors could be monitored on their phones through app surveillance. The event has also been criticized for human rights abuses: The death of American sports journalist Grant Wahl, who died on the way to the hospital after collapsing at the World Cup stadium, resulted in renewed attention on the rights of LGBTQ individuals in Qatar.

Co-Op is facing a legal challenge to its'Orwellian' and'unlawful' use of facial recognition cameras. Privacy rights group Big Brother Watch claimed supermarket staff could add people to a secret'blacklist' without them knowing. But Co-Op says it is using the Facewatch system in shops with a history of crime, so it can protect its staff. Big Brother Watch said the independent grocery chain had installed the surveillance technology in 35 stores across Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Southampton and London. It claimed staff could add individuals to a watch-list where their biometric information is kept for up to two years.

Argentine national security agencies have acquired irregular access to the biometric records of seven million people, including the president, and footage from Buenos Aires for identifying demonstrators via facial recognition cameras when authorized to access a list of fewer than 50,000 persons of interest, reports Página 12 via Público. The Buenos Aires judge who discovered the scandal has now demanded explanations from the city's Minister of Security and Justice as to how biometric data of a set of 62 cases relating to the capital, including those of the Argentine president and vice president, were transferred from the national ID database – the Registro Nacional de las Personas (ReNaPer) – to the city's authorities, namely the police, reports Página 12/Público. A massive breach of ReNaPer's digital ID database was reported last year. Judge Roberto Andrés Gallardo has suspended the use of the facial recognition system in question and has given Marcel D'Alessandro, Minister of Security and Justice for the City of Buenos Aires Government, two days to explain how the biometrics of persons such as former president and current vice president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and fellow former president Alberto Fernández were used. D'Alessandro had previously said that the system had been deactivated during the pandemic.