UK court determines police use of live facial recognition legal Live facial recognition can be deployed nationwide, a U.K. court ruled Tuesday, dismissing arguments from plaintiffs who said the technology is racially biased and is used arbitrarily. The cameras are typically placed in high-traffic areas and are used to match pictures of passersby to a watchlist of criminal suspects. London’s Metropolitan Police celebrated the decision, saying the technology has helped them secure 2,100 arrests — including of 100 sex offenders — since 2024. One of the plaintiffs, Shaun Thompson, said he was wrongly identified by the cameras and improperly threatened with arrest. The other, Silkie Carlo, is a privacy advocate with Big Brother Watch, an organization that fights against surveillance technologies. Thompson was threatened with arrest in February 2024 near London Bridge after he was mistakenly identified as his brother, who is on a police watchlist, according to a media summary provided by the court. He refused to provide police with fingerprints to prove his identity. The episode left him “distressed, angry, and fearful of being wrongly identified again,” according to the media summary. Thompson and Carlo did not argue that live facial recognition is illegal in principle, but instead contended that the Metropolitan Police’s policy leaves “too much discretion to police officers as to where, why and against whom LFR may be used” and thereby violates European human rights law. The decision comes at a time when the U.K. has been roiled by debate about law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology. In December, the British Home Office said it wanted law enforcement to use facial recognition at “significantly greater scale.” It launched a public consultation to determine how to implement a more robust legal framework for its deployment. Hours after the announcement, the Home Office released a report