Good morning. Over the last couple of days, the Guardian has been reporting that facial recognition technology is being rolled out across the UK at a pace that appears to be outstripping the rules designed to govern it. Police forces are increasingly using live systems to scan members of the public in real time, while retailers are deploying similar tools to identify suspected shoplifters.
Advocates of the technology argue that facial recognition is effective and here to stay. Critics warn it risks creating a system where people are monitored – and sometimes wrongly flagged – without clear safeguards.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke to the Guardian’s UK technology editor, Robert Booth, about how the technology works, how widely it is now being used and what happens when it goes wrong. First, this morning’s headlines.
Five big stories
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Middle East crisis | Donald Trump has threatened that Iran will be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacks US vessels trying to reopen a route through the strait of Hormuz.
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Delivery industry | More than 7,000 Just Eat couriers are taking legal action against the food delivery company in an attempt to gain better employment rights, including the minimum wage and holiday pay.
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Europe | At the European Political Community summit in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, Keir Starmer has called on Europe to “face up” to tensions with the Trump administration, as heads of government gathered to discuss the EU’s loan scheme for Ukraine.
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UK news | Keir Starmer will call for a whole-of-society response to rising antisemitism on Tuesday, saying that it is not enough simply to condemn the scourge, but people “must show it” through their actions too.
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Cost of living | Food prices are set to be 50% higher by November compared to 2021, according to research by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
In depth: ‘There’s a sense that it’s happening in a creeping way’
One afternoon recently in Croydon, Robert Booth watched as police officers trialled a deployment of live facial recognition cameras. Mounted high above the street, the cameras were switched on for a few hours at a time. Nearby, uniformed and plainclothes officers lingered, waiting. When someone on a watchlist passed through the camera’s field of view, an alert was sent to officers’ phones. What happened next was striking.
“It was like a trap snapping shut,” Robert tells me. Within seconds, officers converged on the individual – “a kind of net closing” – often before the person had any idea they had been identified. In one case, he saw a man taken to the ground by several officers in a matter of moments.
“It all just happens in a flash,” he says. “That kind of thing happening in the public sphere, enabled entirely by technology, feels quite new.”
How does it work – and…
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