The UK’s £55.5 million push for facial recognition technology risks a profound invasion of privacy, setting a precarious precedent for surveillance overreach.

In the UK, the government has presented its plans for a large-scale increase of the use of facial recognition technology which the police want to deploy in a number of ways and across a range of locations.

According to Big Brother Watch, taxpayers in that country will foot the bill amounting to a total of £230 million (some $288 million). In return for financing this expansion of what the rights group calls Orwellian tech, citizens will be subjected to even more intense mass surveillance.

This will work by surveilling everyone in a crowd in real time so that the police can compare images of those they are looking for hoping to find them among a mass of people. Other than the convoy of vans equipped with live facial recognition, the government also hopes to use the same technology on fixed cameras installed at train stations, and an app for police officers to carry out facial recognition on anyone they choose to stop in the street.

https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-plans-facial-recognition-expansion-empowering-cops-to-scan-faces-in-the-street