Facial recognition… coming to a supermarket near you

The technology is helping to combat crimes police no longer deal with, but its use raises concerns about civil liberties

Paul Wilks runs a Budgens supermarket in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Like most retail owners, he'd had problems with shoplifting - largely carried out by a relatively small number of repeat offenders. Then a year or so ago, exasperated, he installed something called Facewatch. It's a facial-recognition system that watches people coming into the store; it has a database of "subjects of interest" (SOIs), and if it recognises one, it sends a discreet alert to the store manager. "If someone triggers the alert," says Paul, "they're approached by a member of management, and asked to leave, and most of the time they duly do."

Facial recognition, in one form or another, is in the news most weeks at the moment. Recently, a novelty phone app, FaceApp, which takes your photo and ages it to show what you'll look like in a few decades, caused a public freakout when people realised it was a Russian company and decided it was using their faces for surveillance. (It appears to have been doing nothing especially objectionable.) More seriously, the city authority in San Francisco have banned the use of facial-recognition technologies by the police and other government agencies; and the House of Commons science and technology committee has called for British police to stop using it as well, until regulation is in place, though the then home secretary (now chancellor) Sajid Javid, said he was in favour of trials continuing.