London police to expand live facial recognition use
London's Metropolitan Police is planning to expand its use of live facial recognition technology, broadening the deployment of a surveillance tool that scans faces in public spaces and matches them against police watchlists in real time.
Why this matters: Live facial recognition does not wait for you to do something wrong. It scans you as you walk down the street, compares your face to a database, and flags you before anyone has a reason to look twice. That is a meaningful shift in how public space works. London already has one of the densest camera networks in the world. Expanding live facial recognition on top of that means more people get stopped based on algorithmic matches, which have a documented record of errors, especially for darker-skinned faces. More deployment without clear public oversight means less ability to push back when it goes wrong.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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