Controversial facial recognition returns to scan faces in central London

Technology scans faces near Oxford Circus Tube station

Plans are being pushed through despite concerns over accuracy and privacy (Zoe Tidman / The Independent)

Facial recognition has returned to central London less than a week after the controversial technology was last used in the capital.

Cameras scanned faces of people walking near Oxford Circus Tube station on Thursday afternoon, close to where the technology was deployed six days ago.

Live facial recognition (LFR) would be used in “key locations in Westminster” to check against a list of wanted suspects from 1pm, the Metropolitan Police tweeted two hours before the deployment.

A force spokesperson told The Independent they planned to place cameras in the area for a few hours.

Posters and police leaflets warned members of the public LFR was in use, while some protesters near the LFR van held up signs and wore facepaint they claimed stopped their faces from being recognised by the software.

One woman was arrested around 5.30pm ”for failing to appear in court in connection with a serious assault on an emergency service worker”, police said.

Police have pushed forwards with plans to use LFR in London, despite concerns over the technology’s accuracy and fears it could compromise innocent people’s privacy.

Trials carried out by the Met between 2016 and 2018 wrongly identified members of the public as potential criminals 96 per cent of the time, figures have revealed.

The Met said they have measured the accuracy of the system based on International Organisation for Standardisation-agreed methodology.

“Tests indicate that when a person not on a watchlist walks in front of a LFR camera, then there is a maximum 1 in a 1000 chance that the system will generate a false alert,” a force spokesperson told The Independent. “Every alert is assessed by an officer and a false alert from the system does not always mean that an officer will speak to the person the alert is generated against.”

Facial recognition was used in Oxford Circus last Friday, although the deployment finished early due to connectivity issues with the technology, a Met spokesperson told The Independent.

Police were met by protesters with signs to rally against facial recognition as cameras scanned faces and comparing them against a police watchlist in the busy zone of central London last week.

“The Met has instantly showed its intentions to use live facial recognition surveillance pervasively and disproportionately,” Silkie Carlo, from civil liberties and privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said following news of Thursday’s deployment.

“It is now using the mass surveillance tool weekly and with unregulated watchlists of many thousands of people.”

The Met pointed The Independent towards a section of their website outlining how they use LFR.

A Met spokesperson told The Independent: “Our primary focus is on the most serious crimes so the watchlist will include people wanted for serious offences for example knife and gun crime and those with outstanding warrants who are proving hard to find. The technology cannot identify people who are not on the watchlist.

“The biometric data of those who do not cause an alert is automatically and immediately deleted.”

Police are alerted if there is a potential match and officers then decide whether to approach the member of the public, the Met explained.

London’s first official deployment of facial recognition took place in early February outside Stratford railway station in east London and resulted in no arrests, as well as no matches to wanted criminals.

Two men were detained and released with no further action by officers during the deployment in Oxford Circus last week, although neither had passed through the LFR zone, a Met spokesperson told The Independent.

Eight arrests have been made as a result of the eight trials using the technology over the course of three years.