A six-month trial of live facial recognition (LFR) technology in London’s railway stations that cost more than £320,000 and almost 100 hours of police officers’ time led to one false match against a watchlist of suspects and no arrests.
Last month BTP announced it was extending the trial for a further four months and expanding the deployments to include London Underground stations.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has since confirmed the technology will be used on the newly pedestrianised Oxford Street.
A recent report from parliament’s joint committee on human rights, which called on the government to introduce a law to address the threat of artificial intelligence to human rights, identified the rollout of live facial recognition technology as a “particularly clear example of risk”.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill, said: “Live facial recognition technologies are a serious invasion of our privacy.