Has your local shop blacklisted you?

00:00 06:42

Silkie Carlo has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Britain’s obsession with surveillance is reaching new heights. Several of the UK’s largest retailers have quietly installed facial recognition checkpoints on their doorways and inside their shops. It means that automated identity checks are taking place on our high streets without customers even being aware of it.

The cameras look like any other CCTV cameras, except they take a biometric scan of every customer’s face, like at a passport e-gate. The facial recognition scans are then compared against a private database run by the software company Facewatch. The database is populated by various shops’ CCTV images of people security staff think may be involved in ‘crime or disorder’. You won’t be informed if your photo is taken and added to a watchlist; neither is a police report required for your face to be added. The system operates entirely separately to law enforcement.

Many retailers have started to use Facewatch, including Budgens, Morrisons Daily, Sports Direct, Flannels and Home Bargains. As shoplifting rates rise, more companies are installing Facewatch’s software. According to the British Retail Consortium, only 8 per cent of incidents of violence and abuse are prosecuted and since shops are giving up on the police (they aren’t the only ones), it is estimated that only a third of such incidents are even reported.

While I understand that security staff have a difficult job to do, it would be plainly dangerous to let them replace the police, judges and juries. Yet that is effectively what has happened. Members of the public are being technologically blacklisted from major retailers on the say of security guards, often without knowing what they have been accused of or how to clear their name.