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.'

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.

A start-up has launched a line of clothing that confuses artificial intelligence (AI) cameras and stops them from recognizing the wearer. Italian start-up Cap_able is offering its first collection of knitted garments that shields the wearer from the facial recognition software in AI cameras without the need to cover their face. Called the Manifesto Collection, the clothing line includes hoodies, pants, t-shirts, and dresses. Each garment sports a pattern, known as an "adversarial patch," which was developed by AI algorithms to confuse facial recognition software in real-time and protect the wearer's privacy. The camera will either fail to identify the wearer or it will think they are one of the animals embedded into the pattern which includes a zebra, a giraffe, or a dog, among other animals.

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.

Police in London are moving ahead with a deploying a facial recognition camera system despite privacy concerns and evidence that the technology is riddled with false positives. The Metropolitan Police, the U.K.'s biggest police department with jurisdiction over most of London, announced Friday it would begin rolling out new "live facial recognition" cameras in London, making the capital one of the largest cities in the West to adopt the controversial technology. The "Met," as the police department is known in London, said in a statement the facial recognition technology, which is meant to identify people on a watch list and alert police to their real-time location, would be "intelligence-led" and deployed to only specific locations. It's expected to be rolled out as soon as next month. However, privacy activists immediately raised concerns, noting that independent reviews of trials of the technology showed a failure rate of 81%.

China's rapidly evolving surveillance technologies have snared their share of fugitives in recent years. Most of these cases have involved facial recognition cameras, which can detect individual facial features regardless of glasses, hats or masks. There were the 80-odd wanted suspects picked out of crowds of tens of thousands of fans at concerts by Jacky Cheung, a legendary Hong Kong pop star. In April this year, a genius student wanted on suspicion of killing his mother was caught after being on the lam for almost four years. He was nabbed within 10 minutes of entering Chongqing airport, local media outlet Southern Metropolis Daily reported.

How would you feel being watched, tracked and identified by facial recognition cameras everywhere you go? Facial recognition cameras are now creeping onto the streets of Britain and the U.S., yet most people aren't even aware. As we walk around, our faces could be scanned and subjected to a digital police line up we don't even know about. There are over 6 million surveillance cameras in the U.K. – more per citizen than any other country in the world, except China. In the U.K., biometric photos are taken and stored of people whose faces match with criminals – even if the match is incorrect. As director of the U.K. civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, I have been investigating the U.K. police's "trials" of live facial recognition surveillance for several years. Understandably, people are shocked when they see facial recognition cameras appearing on their streets – and many people strongly object to it.