Christmas shoppers used to test facial recognition tech slammed as inaccurate
Met Police using controversial facial recognition technology in London’s Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and Soho
The Metropolitan Police is using unmarked vans to scan Christmas shoppers to compare them against a database of “people of interest”. A Freedom of Information request by campaign group Big Brother Watch had shown earlier this year that the controversial technology had a false positive rate of 98%.
"The police's use of this authoritarian surveillance tool in total absence of a legal or democratic basis is alarming. Live facial recognition is a form of mass surveillance that, if allowed to continue, will turn members of the public into walking ID cards." – Silkie Carlo, Big Brother Watch
The Register: Who's watching you from an unmarked van while you shop in London? Cops with facial recog tech