Supermarket chain Iceland has announced that it is deploying live facial recognition in two of its shops in the north of England, with plans to expand it further later in the year.
Customers’s faces are automatically scanned against a watchlist of ‘subjects of interest’ who are alleged to have committed an offence and who are blacklisted from stores, with any matches alerting shop staff.
The technology is provided by Facewatch, a company whose system was linked to the wrongful accusation and ejection of a mum from a Home Bargains store earlier this month. Facewatch has also been investigated by the UK data watchdog, the Information Commissioner, who concluded last year that the firm had breached data protection laws on eight different counts.
Jake Hurfurt, Head of Research and Investigations at Big Brother Watch, said:
“Iceland’s decision to deploy dystopian facial recognition technology to monitor its customers is disproportionate and chilling. Thousands of people will have their privacy rights violated just to buy basic necessities, and Iceland will turn its shoppers into suspects, making them submit to a biometric identity check as part of their daily lives.
Just last week we saw Facewatch embroiled in a scandal when its dystopian tech was used to falsely accuse a woman of shoplifting, and throw her out of the store. Now Iceland plans to bring in the same system to surveil its customers. Facial recognition has no basis in law and has never been voted on in parliament, but the UK is facing an explosion in the Orwellian technology as both businesses and police take advantage of a legal wild west. Iceland should abandon this rollout and put its customers’s privacy first, and the government must act to rein in the unchecked expansion of this intrusive technology.”
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