British Transport Police spent £320,786 testing live facial recognition at London stations and scanned more than 500,000 faces; the six-month trial produced one alert, and that person was wrongly identified
British Transport Police spent over £320,000 on a six-month live facial recognition trial at London train stations, scanning more than half a million faces. The trial generated a single alert, and that one match turned out to be wrong.
Why this matters: Half a million people were scanned without suspicion, without consent, and without result. The one person the system flagged was innocent. That is not a small error rate. That is the entire outcome. People moving through London stations did not know they were part of a biometric experiment paid for by public money. The technology failed on its own terms. The bigger problem is that failure here does not mean the program stops. It usually means more funding to try again.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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