Met to extend live facial recognition to West End
London's Metropolitan Police is expanding its live facial recognition program into the West End, one of the city's busiest commercial and entertainment districts. The move broadens the technology's reach beyond previous deployments to an area visited by millions of residents and tourists each year.
Why this matters: This puts real-time face scanning in one of the most crowded public spaces in Europe. Anyone walking through the West End — shopping, going to a show, passing through — gets scanned whether they know it or not. That is not targeted policing. That is a standing checkpoint with a camera. The burden of proof runs backward: you are in the database, or you are not, and you have no say in being checked. If the Met gets this wrong, innocent people get stopped. There is no obvious way for the public to find out how often that happens.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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