The Government are chalking up plans to use facial recognition technology on shoppers to match them with known shoplifters recorded on police databases. Data analysed by the BBC showed that while the cost of living crisis has increasingly puts many Britons in distress, the number of shoplifting offences have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Mark Johnson, from Big Brother Watch said: “Live facial recognition is a dystopian mass surveillance tool that turns innocent members of the public into walking ID cards.
“Deploying this face-scanning surveillance to track the public is a dangerously authoritarian step that aligns the UK with the likes of Russia and China.
Rather than promote its use, the government should follow other liberal democracies around the world that are legislating to ban this Orwellian technology from public spaces.”
A number of flaws in the functioning of the technology have also been outlined by campaigners with police’s own statistics showing that over 8 in 10 facial recognition matches have been inaccurate. Mark Johnson comments that this flawed technology is “not an efficient crime fighting tool”.
BBC – Warning over using face recognition to catch shoplifters