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.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The city of Detroit will pay 300,000 to a man wrongly accused of shoplifting. Robert Williams' driver's license picture was incorrectly flagged as a likely match for a man captured on grainy security video at a Shinola watch store theft in 2018. Williams was arrested two years later in front of his wife and two young daughters on their front lawn in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills.

The police will be able to run facial recognition searches on a database containing images of Britain's 50 million driving licence holders under a law change being quietly introduced by the government. Should the police wish to put a name to an image collected on CCTV, or shared on social media, the legislation would provide them with the powers to search driving licence records for a match. The move, contained in a single clause in a new criminal justice bill, could put every driver in the country in a permanent police lineup, according to privacy campaigners. Facial recognition searches match the biometric measurements of an identified photograph, such as that contained on driving licences, to those of an image picked up elsewhere. The intention to allow the police or the National Crime Agency (NCA) to exploit the UK's driving licence records is not explicitly referenced in the bill or in its explanatory notes, raising criticism from leading academics that the government is "sneaking it under the radar".

Detroit's police chief admitted on Monday that facial recognition technology used by the department misidentifies suspects about 96 percent of the time. It's an eye-opening admission given that the Detroit Police Department is facing criticism for arresting a man based on a bogus match from facial recognition software. Last week, the ACLU filed a complaint with the Detroit Police Department on behalf of Robert Williams, a Black man who was wrongfully arrested for stealing five watches worth $3,800 from a luxury retail store. Investigators first identified Williams by doing a facial recognition search with software from a company called DataWorks Plus. Under police questioning, Williams pointed out that the grainy surveillance footage obtained by police didn't actually look like him.

Did you know that a wide range of businesses and professionals are using facial recognition search engines? Lawyers, photographers, bloggers, celebrities, models, recruiters and marketing agencies are just some of the people who are embracing this new technology. In this post, we showcase 8 facial recognition search engines you can use to find similar pictures and videos online. Online facial recognition search is only a subset of what a full-set solution might be able to accomplish. As technology advances, software vendors have begun offering Face Recognition Online APIs that you can easily integrate with your Apps and information systems.

Many of California's local law enforcement agencies have access to facial recognition software for identifying suspects who appear in crime scene footage, documents obtained through public records requests show. Three California counties also have the capability to run facial recognition searches on each others' mug shot databases, and others could join if they choose to opt into a network maintained by a private law enforcement software company. The network is called California Facial Recognition Interconnect, and it's a service offered by DataWorks Plus, a Greenville, South Carolina–based company with law enforcement contracts in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Santa Barbara. Currently, the three adjacent counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino are able to run facial recognition against mug shots in each other's databases. That means these police departments have access to about 11.7 million mug shots of people who have previously been arrested, a majority of which come from the Los Angeles system.

Police departments across the nation are generating leads and making arrests by feeding celebrity photos, CGI renderings, and manipulated images into facial recognition software. Often unbeknownst to the public, law enforcement is identifying suspects based on "all manner of'probe photos,' photos of unknown individuals submitted for search against a police or driver license database," a study published on Thursday by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology reported. The new research comes on the heels of a landmark privacy vote on Tuesday in San Francisco, which is now the first US city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by police and government agencies. A recent groundswell of opposition has led to the passage of legislation that aims to protect marginalized communities from spy technology. These systems "threaten to fundamentally change the nature of our public spaces," said Clare Garvie, author of the study and senior associate at the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology.