The Engineer

Last week's poll: Facial recognition technology in the UK

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Last week, Met police chief Cressida Dick defended the force’s use of facial recognition in London. We asked our readers what they thought about the technology in its current state.

Dick was seeking to dispel what she perceives as several myths regarding the facial recognition techniques used by the Met. The commissioner claimed the LFR (live facial recognition) system does not store biometric data from the public faces it scans, instead only seeking to match faces to those of serious criminals on a watchlist. When a match is flagged by LFR, it is always up to human officers whether to intervene. Dick also claimed that the technology was proven to not have an ethnic bias.

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But critics of the technology point to a number of issues. Its current accuracy is under question, with civil liberties group Big Brother Watch claiming that 93 per cent of all those stopped under the Met’s trials were wrongly identified. A recent study from surveillance expert Prof Pete Fussey of Essex University found that the Met’s technology was verifiably accurate just 19 per cent of the time.

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