Facial recognition technology in shops will soon alert police in real time to the presence of serious offenders, with civil liberties groups warning of a “dangerous escalation” towards surveillance and criminalisation in the retail sector.
Facewatch, a facial recognition system used by more than 100 businesses including Sainsbury’s, B&M and Spar to monitor thieves, said it was launching a UK-first feature to “alert police instantly when the most serious offenders trigger a live facial recognition match”.
The company’s chief executive, Nick Fisher, said the “unique technical development” would be launched in autumn and would warn police in an average of four seconds when the “worst offenders” were flagged on its network.
Civil liberties groups have voiced alarm at the development, saying it had “shot on far ahead of the regulation” and was “upending” the way retail crime was dealt with.
Charlie Whelton, the policy and campaigns officer at Liberty, said it was concerned about this “untested, opaque development” and the way facial recognition technology had been allowed to “proliferate without anything to govern it”.
“It’s not against the law to walk into a shop even if you’ve committed crimes in the past,” he said. “The idea of calling the police on somebody who hasn’t committed a crime, but there’s a concern they might, is really upending the way we do things.
“And of course, it’s not infallible. These systems do make mistakes, and it’s very hard to argue with that when it happens to you.”
A number of people have been forced to leave shops after being falsely identified by Facewatch technology as a shoplifter, with some describing it as “Orwellian” and saying they felt as though they were “guilty until proven innocent”.
Evidence suggests black and Asian people are more likely to be incorrectly identified than white people.
Britain’s biometrics watchdogs have also warned that national oversight of facial recognition is lagging behind the rapid expansion of the technology across police forces and the retail sector.
Sarah Lasoye, the pre-crime programme manager at Open Rights Group, said the technology was “entrenching a climate of surveillance across public life”.
“Fundamentally, it’s an infringement of people’s rights,” she said. “People’s faces being scanned and being added to lists is worrying enough, but the speed which it’s now possible for someone to encounter the police force in the middle of their daily shop is a really dangerous escalation.”
She said the technology failed to address the root causes of shoplifting and “only served to further criminalise working-class communities”.
The use of the Facewatch technology looks set to quickly expand, with Sainsbury’s recently announcing plans to increase its use from 55 stores to more than 200 by the end of the year.
Facewatch said it alerted retailers almost 300,000 times that a “known repeat offender” had…
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