Jessica Murray

So facial recognition technology can be quite simple.

So all police forces, for instance, across the country have access to technology that can sort of map faces in, for example, CCTV footage or dashcam footage, doorbell footage to a sort of police database of mugshots, essentially, to try and find criminals or potential offenders.

What's increasingly being used and which is causing quite a lot of controversy is the use of live facial recognition technology.

And that is where cameras are scanning faces in real time.

So people walking down the street, doing their shopping at a supermarket or attending a big event.

And it's scanning thousands, millions of faces and in real time mapping them to police databases so that police within seconds could spot someone in a crowd, match them to the database and arrest someone instantly.

It's growing at such a rapid pace that there's a lot of concern about whether there's enough oversight and regulation of this.

Yeah, so a lot of supermarkets and shops are using this technology called face watch.

And what that essentially means is if there is someone in the shop who they believe to be a shoplifter or exhibits some kind of antisocial behaviour, is violent or aggressive towards staff, they can use the CCTV footage, the cameras in store to kind of

flag their face on the system and that means if that individual then goes into the shop again or to another branch of the shop when they walk in their face will be scanned and it will flag on the system to a security guard and that means they can instantly find that person in the shop ask them to leave or you know follow them around the shop to you know keep an eye on them or whatever it is they deem to be acceptable to do.

So Sainsbury's is one of the biggest shops to have rolled out last year, but also Morrison's Daily, Sports Direct, Costcutter, B&M, Home Bargains, Spa.

I mean, there's quite a few and it tends to be those kind of high street stores, supermarkets, corner shops who maybe are kind of at the front line of shoplifting.

So, yes, it's quite a few shops and it is growing all the time.

I was going to say, yeah, if you're popping into sort of home bargains to buy, you know, just a couple of bits, I think the vast majority of people will not realise that their face is being scanned.

And yeah, they're potentially, you know, being added to some sort of watch list.

It's quite crazy.

So it's from around 2017 that the first facial recognition software started to be rolled out in shops.

But I'd say it's really sort of from 2020 onwards that we've started to see it becoming much more commonplace online.

And big retailers like Sainsbury's only just started using it last year in 2025.

So it's still fairly early days, but I think it's growing quite rapidly.