London's Met police to scale up use of drones and live facial recognition
London's Metropolitan Police plans to expand its use of drones and live facial recognition technology, signaling a significant broadening of real-time surveillance capabilities across the city.
Why this matters: Live facial recognition does not just catch suspects. It scans everyone in the frame, including people who have done nothing wrong. Scaling it up alongside drones means more of London's public space becomes monitored in real time, automatically, and often without people knowing. That is a different kind of city than one with fixed cameras. The technology makes mistakes, and those mistakes tend to fall hardest on people who are already over-policed. Expansion needs clear rules about who gets scanned, when, and what happens to that data.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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