Big Brother Watch condemns unregulated and permanent use of live facial recognition in Croydon.

Big Brother Watch Team / March 24, 2025

Responding to news that the Metropolitan Police Service has installed permanent facial recognition cameras in Croydon, civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch said it represented a “steady slide into a dystopian nightmare” and warned of the lack of “oversight or legislative basis”.

Previously, the Met has only used CCTV cameras mounted on police vans, which have been clearly marked and are present only during a time-limited deployment. The cameras allow the police to scan and compare every passerby against an expansive watchlist complied by the Met, which can include “vulnerable” people and victims of crime. Parliament has passed no legislation which mentions facial recognition, and police forces write their own policies on how they plan to use the technology.

COMMENT

Big Brother Watch Interim Director Rebecca Vincent: “We are alarmed by reports that the Metropolitan Police Service is installing an unprecedented permanent network of fixed live facial recognition cameras across Croydon town centre, which marks a worrying escalation in the use of LFR with no oversight or legislative basis.
This comes on the back of a failed trial in Cardiff, where anyone who entered the city centre was subjected to mass surveillance through a network of temporary LFR cameras, as police scanned more than 160,000 faces during a Six Nations game, but made zero arrests.

It’s time to stop this steady slide into a dystopian nightmare, and halt all use of LFR technology across the UK until legislative safeguards are introduced”.

 

NOTES
  • Shaun Thompson, an anti-knife crime campaigner who the Met misidentified with facial recognition technology, is currently challenging the Metropolitan Police’s unregulated use of facial recognition.

 

DONATE TO BIG BROTHER WATCH

Go back to media