Jessica Murray

So if your face is scanned and you're not a match on the system, then it's instantly deleted and discarded.

So your face isn't kept on the system unless you are one of the people who's been flagged.

For instance, if they believe you have been a shoplifter or you've committed some sort of offence, then yes, what's called your biometric template, which is your face scan, will be kept on the system.

But not if you're just a sort of innocent shopper.

Yeah, so they were all, obviously, as you said, pretty stunned, shocked.

I think all three of the people I spoke to said they wished they'd kind of asked more questions and been more curious at the time the incident happened.

But I think when something like that happens to you, you're often so kind of shell-shocked that you don't know what to say.

It's embarrassing as well, isn't it, to be escorted out of a shop by a security guard?

So I think for all three individuals, they were literally just pointed to the poster that I mentioned, the FaceWatch poster, which will essentially say that this shop is being monitored by FaceWatch technology.

But I think it led them to very little information and it took all three of them quite a lot of calls, various different avenues that they went down to try and get to the bottom of what had happened to them, why they were on this system and how they could kind of clear their name.

Yes, I remember.

So one woman I spoke to, Jenny, she said she went on the FaceWatch website.

She saw how many shops were using this and she just thought, you know, I'll never be able to shop in person again.

I'll have to do all my shopping online because she just thought every time I go into a shop, am I going to be asked to leave?

Am I, you know, sort of blacklisted?

Yeah, so Ian, like all the people I spoke to, he found a phone number for FaceWatch, which he tried to call but was just directed to a message which basically said, FaceWatch doesn't take calls, please contact us via the website.

which I think he found really frustrating, the difficulty in not being able to talk to a human being about this.

So he then reached out to FaceWatch and they wouldn't give him any information until he'd provided a copy of his passport to prove his identity.

And that happened to a couple of the people I spoke to who found it really odd and frustrating that there's this private company that they've never heard of before, which has this information on them.

And they're having to provide a copy of their passport just to sort of find out.