UK Rail Facial Recognition Pilot Scans 500,000 Faces, Costs Over £320,000 and Yields No Arrests

The Guardian reported that BTP said that since the extension there had been three positive confirmed alerts of people who were subsequently confirmed to be complying with sexual harm prevention orders or other imposed court conditions. The original six-month trial produced just one alert, and that alert was a false positive.

When Transport for London announced its support for the extension, it said LFR technology would 'target and identify people on police watchlists at key stations chosen for maximum impact' and would 'specifically tackle violence against women and girls, whose travel behaviours are shaped by experiences of sexual harassment and sexual offences.'

Fraser Sampson, a former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner for the UK, said police needed to show that the use of the technology was proportionate. He said many variables needed to align, including the choice of location, times of day, the make-up of the watchlist and the likelihood of people being present. Sampson, who is now a non-executive director of Facewatch, a company that operates facial recognition systems in shops, added: 'We know the technology works, but using it in supermarkets to deter shoplifters and prevent attacks on staff is very different from deploying it to catch people on a public transport network.'

He said success in a shop meant no such people coming in, while success for police trying to catch people meant people being caught. 'In that respect the trial doesn't appear to have been very fruitful,' he said. Everything depended on police watchlists, he said; if a person is not on a watchlist, live FRT cameras do not 'see' them and do not retain their image in the same way as CCTV cameras. However, the systems are processing special category personal data, and the technology must be used in a way that is appropriate, proportionate and necessary, he said. It was for the police to show how any deployment met those criteria and, as the Information Commissioner's Office had recently reported, for their oversight boards to hold them firmly to account in doing so, he said.