Police urged to consider facial recognition to tackle crime and football violence
Police in the UK are being encouraged to expand their use of facial recognition technology as a tool for addressing general crime and disorder at football matches. The push appears to come from official or advisory bodies urging broader adoption of the technology by law enforcement.
Why this matters: Facial recognition at football grounds means scanning the faces of tens of thousands of people who have done nothing wrong in order to find a small number who have. That is a significant step. Fans do not get a say, they are not warned in any meaningful way, and misidentification can get an innocent person removed or arrested in front of a crowd. Sport is already a heavily surveilled environment. Treating every supporter as a potential suspect to catch a few bad actors is exactly the kind of scope creep that makes this technology hard to walk back once it is in place.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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