Responding to news of the UK Government’s plan to “ramp up facial recognition”, director of Big Brother Watch Silkie Carlo said:
ON MASS SURVEILLANCE
“For our streets to be safer the government need to focus their resources on real criminals rather than spending public money turning the country into an open prison with surveillance of the general population.
“Facial recognition surveillance is out of control, with the police’s own records showing over 7 million innocent people in England and Wales have been scanned by police facial recognition cameras in the past year alone.
“Live facial recognition could be the end of privacy as we know it. With the government now threatening to introduce mandatory ID cards with our facial biometrics on them too, we are hurtling towards an authoritarian surveillance state that would make Orwell roll in his grave.”
ON THE DNA COMPARISON
“Facial recognition is indeed a powerful technology much like DNA, but we would never accept DNA checkpoints across our high streets and nor should we accept widespread face recognition checkpoints, treating us all like criminals in a constant line up.”
ON WATCHLISTS
“Far from only wanted criminals, victims of crime and ‘vulnerable’ people can be added to police watchlists, and we frequently see innocent people being stopped and questioned by police due to mistakes with the tech. The Metropolitan Police is currently facial a legal challenge by a community worker they wrongly stopped and questioned for half an hour due to a misidentification.”
ON THE CONSULTATION AND LAW
“Police have been using facial recognition technology absent a democratic or legal basis for a decade, making this consultation necessary but long overdue. If the government intends to take the public’s views in this consultation seriously, they should immediately stop the police’s widespread use of facial recognition surveillance pending the outcome but instead they have just funded a major expansion of these cameras across our towns and cities.
“Laws in Europe protect the public against facial recognition mass surveillance, but Britain is an outlier in the democratic world with the public now watched by these cameras and treated like suspects on an almost daily basis.”
ENDS
NOTES:
-
Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo and an anti-knife crime community worker are both claimants in a landmark legal challenge against the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition surveillance
- Spokespeople are available for interview. Please direct enquiries or requests for interviews to info@bigbrotherwatch.org.uk or 07730439257
- More detail on Big Brother Watch’s work on facial recognition is available on our website
- Met Police to 21/11/25 – c.3.51 million faces scanned
- South Wales Police to 15/11/25 – c.1.84 million faces scanned
- Essex Police to 26/8/25 – c.1.18 million faces scanned
- Bedfordshire Police to 26/11/25 – c.222,000 faces scanned
- Greater Manchester Police to 22/11/25 – c.160,000 faces scanned
- Surrey Police to 2/12/25 – c.22,000 faces scanned
- Sussex Police to 2/12/25 – c.64,000 faces scanned
- Total in excess of 7 million faces scanned