Police to deploy Live Facial Recognition vans in Portsmouth
Police in Portsmouth are set to deploy mobile live facial recognition units, using vans to scan faces in public spaces in real time. The move extends a surveillance capability that has drawn scrutiny in other UK cities to a new location.
Why this matters: Live facial recognition in a van means the camera comes to you. It does not wait at a fixed point. It can be parked outside a protest, a mosque, a festival, or a shopping street. Everyone in range gets scanned, whether they are a suspect or not. Most people walking past will never know it happened. That kind of quiet, mobile surveillance changes what it means to move through your own city. The accountability question is simple: who decides where the van parks, and what happens to the data on everyone it did not find?
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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