The Metropolitan police commissioner has hit back at demands to drop the use of live facial recognition cameras at this weekend's Notting Hill carnival over concerns of racial bias and an impending legal challenge. Mark Rowley wrote in a letter that the instant face-matching technology would be used at Europe's biggest street carnival "in a non-discriminatory way" using an algorithm that "does not perform in a way which exhibits bias". He was responding to a letter from 11 anti-racist and civil liberty organisations, disclosed in the Guardian, that urged the Met to scrap the use of the technology at an event that celebrates the African-Caribbean community. The Runnymede Trust, Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Race on the Agenda, and Human Rights Watch were among those who claimed in the letter to Rowley on Saturday that the technology "will only exacerbate concerns about abuses of state power and racial discrimination within your force". Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to "self-regulate" their use of the technology because of the lack of a legal framework and deploy the technology's algorithm at lower settings that are biased against ethnic minorities and women.

The Met commissioner should scrap plans to deploy live facial recognition (LFR) at next weekend's Notting Hill carnival because the technology is riven with "racial bias" and subject to a legal challenge, 11 civil liberty and anti-racist groups have demanded. A letter sent to Mark Rowley warns that use of instant face-matching cameras at an event that celebrates the African-Caribbean community "will only exacerbate concerns about abuses of state power and racial discrimination within your force". The Runnymede Trust, Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Race on the Agenda, and Human Rights Watch are among those who claim the technology "is less accurate for women and people of colour". The demand comes just days after ministers ramped up the deployment of vans fixed with facial recognition technology to nine forces across England and Wales. The Met said last month it would deploy specially mounted cameras at entries and exits of the two-day event in west London.

Facial recognition software used by the UK's biggest police force has returned false positives in more than 98 per cent of alerts generated, The Independent can reveal, with the country's biometrics regulator calling it "not yet fit for use". The Metropolitan Police's system has produced 104 alerts of which only two were later confirmed to be positive matches, a freedom of information request showed. In its response the force said it did not consider the inaccurate matches "false positives" because alerts were checked a second time after they occurred. Facial recognition technology scans people in a video feed and compares their images to pictures stored in a reference library or watch list. It has been used at large events like the Notting Hill Carnival and a Six Nations Rugby match. The system used by another force, South Wales Police, has returned more than 2,400 false positives in 15 deployments since June 2017.

With an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK alone, it will come as no surprise that you're caught on camera on a regular basis. But a shocking new report has revealed that the images of you from CCTV might also be scanned by facial recognition technology – regardless of whether you're doing anything wrong. The report suggests that the UK police have amassed a collection of 19 million photos – equating to around 30 per cent of the British population. A shocking new report has revealed that the images of you from CCTV might also be scanned by facial recognition technology – regardless of whether you're doing anything wrong The findings come from the annual report, Commissioner for the Retention and Use of Biometric Material, written by Paul Wiles, the biometrics commissioner. He says that the database of faces collected from CCTV footage is designed to weed out criminals, but contains images of many people with no criminal dealings.