Police used facial recognition technology along with data from the Police National Database during the summer riots. Commenting on this, Mark Johnson of Big Brother Watch said:
“Northumberland Police’s decision to use facial recognition surveillance tools is concerning from a privacy perspective. Whilst it is important that those who broke the law during the riots are brought to justice, surveillance technologies like retrospective facial recognition are dangerously unregulated in the UK.
“There are real questions to be answered about how many millions of Brits’ photos are integrated into UK-wide facial recognition databases. This is nothing short of Orwellian and demonstrates that regulation of these practices is badly needed in order to protect our right to privacy.”