How London became a test case for using facial recognition in democracies

The police hope the software can solve and prevent crime, but can citizens ever give their consent?

On the last day of January, few of the shoppers and office workers who hurried through Romford town centre in east London, scarves pulled tight against the chill, realised they were guinea pigs in a police experiment.

The officers sitting inside a parked van nearby were watching them on screens, using a new technology that the police hope will radically reduce crime in London — live facial recognition. Cameras stationed near Romford train station picked up every face walking past, and matched it to a police watchlist of wanted criminals. Successful matches would result in immediate arrest.

For all the potential to fight crime, however, the trial quickly stumbled into the thorny issues that surround the technology. A bearded man in a blue baseball cap approached the surveilled area, with his grey jumper pulled up to cover his face. He had just been informed by a bystander that the police were testing facial recognition in the area and did not want to participate.

The police demanded that he comply and scanned his face with a facial recognition tool on a mobile phone. Although his face did not match that of any known criminals, a verbal altercation ensued, which resulted in the man being fined £90 for telling an officer to “piss off”. The entire incident was caught on camera by journalists.

“The fact that he’s walked past clearly masking his face from recognition. It gives us grounds to stop him,”

an officer says, defending his actions.

The incident — one of four arrests of people avoiding the cameras in Romford that day — is one of the reasons that live facial recognition is causing such acute concern among observers and civil rights activists. Given that the technology is such an overt form of surveillance, many believe that explicit consent of citizens is fundamental — something the Romford man never gave.

“When people get stopped and searched in the street, or fined for avoiding cameras, when they don’t consent to being observed by cameras, that is a problem,” says Peter Fussey, a criminologist at the University of Essex who was present in Romford, as an independent police-appointed monitor.

“The most important thing in research ethics, above all else is . . . to be absolutely sure people consent to being part of that research...yet what happened in these trials is that if people did not engage with it, police would intervene, stop them and search them.”

London is now at the forefront of a battle over the use of facial recognition by the authorities that is escalating across many democratic countries. As the technology has become commercially available in recent years, via companies like Apple and Facebook, the biggest uptake has been in countries with authoritarian political systems — most notably in China, which uses facial recognition as part of its extensive and highly intrusive surveillance of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province that has been denounced by human rights groups.