The Home Office has launched a consultation on the use of facial recognition and similar technologies.
Now is your chance to make your voice heard and tell the Home Office about the dangers facial recognition poses to our civil liberties.
You can use the tool we have provided below to tailor your response using your own background, experiences, skills, and concerns. The Home Office is more likely to consider responses that are unique instead of those that are copied and pasted directly.
You must respond by 12/02/2026.
https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/campaigns/stop-facial-recognition/#respond
Top of Form
Step 2: Personalise message
I am writing as a member of the public in response to the Home Office’s consultation on a new legal framework for law enforcement use of biometrics, facial recognition and similar technologies. I believe that the lack of legal framework governing new and emerging biometric technologies is a significant threat to civil liberties. Live facial recognition (LFR) technology is an affront to privacy at both the individual and societal level. It has no place in a free society and it is my hope that the Home Office considers banning LFR deployments altogether when considering responses to Questions 5-8 and Question 13. LFR deployments subject the public to mass biometric identity checks without any basis for suspicion. The technology turns high streets into perpetual line-ups where the presumption of innocence is reversed, as every person who walks by the camera is treated as a suspect-by-default. In 2025 alone, police in the UK have scanned the faces of more than 7 million law-abiding citizens during LFR deployments. In the past several years, politicians across the political spectrum, civil rights, racial justice and equalities groups, and technology experts worldwide have recommended that the use of LFR be halted. I wholeheartedly agree with this recommendation. If the Home Office insists, against my wishes and the wishes of millions of British people, to allow for police to regularly use facial recognition technology, I would expect safeguards such as a warrant and serious crimes (e.g. murder, terrorism, human trafficking, kidnapping) requirement at least as strong as those in the rest of Europe under the EU AI Act. The widespread use of LFR will have a dystopian chilling effect on me and many other law-abiding people. Facial recognition technology, like DNA and fingerprinting technology, is a biometric technology that measures unique features of our bodies that can be used to identify us. Unlike DNA and fingerprint tools, facial recognition does not require that police have physical access to you or a crime scene in order to discover who you are. It disturbs me to think that I might soon be having my face scanned for going about my day. It is not good enough for the police to argue that just because my friends, family, and I “have nothing to fear” that we should not be concerned. I am particularly concerned about how the widespread use of facial recognition will affect racial minorities and women, who have been well-documented to be disproportionately more likely to be misidentified by the technology. For example, in the Metropolitan Police Service’s annual 2025 report, 80% of those wrongly identified during its LFR deployments were black people. I am also concerned that LFR will deter law-abiding people engaged in peaceful and legal protests. I know that police have used facial recognition at protests before, and at a time when the police have been arresting many protestors it is reasonable for law-abiding people to think twice before attending a protest if doing so means subjecting themselves to biometric surveillance. The use of LFR at protests and other legal gatherings must be among your central considerations while you consider answers to Question 7. It is appropriate for the consultation to consider emerging technologies, but the current state of affairs is especially concerning and in need of urgent reform, especially when it comes to facial recognition. Facial recognition software is a uniquely dangerous technology with the potential to end anonymity in public. Not only can it be used to identify me in real-time as I go about my life, it can be used retrospectively to track and monitor the movements and behaviour of individuals across time. All police forces have also been using retrospective facial recognition (RFR) technology, which operates after the fact using still images or video recordings taken in the past and comparing the detected faces to photographs of known individuals held on databases. In 2024, civil society investigations revealed that police forces had secretly been using the UK’s passport database to conduct hundreds of facial recognition searches. As a result, in the words of the former Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, “It’s almost impossible for the citizen to understand who is using what to watch whom.” Like LFR, RFR suffers from racial bias. Unfortunately, despite known biases in the RFR algorithm, police forces successfully lobbied to continue using RFR at settings which were discriminatory to people of colour, women and young people. Retail outlets have increasingly been using facial recognition in attempts to deter and investigate shoplifting. There have been countless media reports about people who have been misidentified by this technology or wrongly placed on watchlists, prompting innocent people being blacklisted from shops across the country. In one particularly harrowing case, a teenager was misidentified in a Home Bargains store, accused of shoplifting, searched, removed from the store and told she was banned from all retailers using the technology. The LFR company later wrote to her, confirming their error. The retail use of facial recognition is not governed by primary legislation and enforcement by the data regulator has been seriously lacking. I am very anxious at the prospect of my grocery shopping trips turning into a nightmare where I am falsely accused of being a thief, publicly humiliated, and banned from shops in my community. The history of police use of facial recognition in the UK is unfortunately one that shows police deploying a mass biometric surveillance technology without any governing legislation. In this respect, the UK is sadly alone among liberal democracies. Multiple US jurisdictions have imposed restrictions on facial recognition, and the EU AI Act broadly prohibits the use of police facial recognition. • Live facial recognition technology is an indiscriminate surveillance tool by design with the capacity to end anonymity in public spaces. It has no place on our high streets or shops and must be prohibited in primary legislation. • Retrospective facial recognition should only be permitted if used in line with new primary legislation that sets out strict restrictions and safeguards, subject to strict limitations on the circumstances in which it can be used and only on lawfully held custody images. • Operator-initiated facial recognition must be prohibited in primary legislation. When you consider Questions 1-4 please keep in mind that a new legal framework must account for significant technological changes that have taken place in the years since DNA and fingerprinting matching became regular features of policing. Given that there is ongoing research into gait and voice recognition as well as odour detection it is critical that lawmakers provide a legal framework that accounts for current technology and anticipates new and emerging biometric technologies. While voice and gait detection are not a regular feature of policing today, technology could improve to the point at which it becomes very attractive to police. The history of police use of facial recognition unfortunately shows clearly that police will use biometric surveillance technology without adequate safeguards when it is tempting for them to do so. Please halt the UK’s descent into a dystopian nightmare and consider the threats, risks, and concerns I have outlined.
