Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment he has made of the potential impact of live facial recognition technologies on the right to privacy.

The use of technologies like facial recognition are an operational matter for the police.

The Government supports police use of facial recognition, including live facial recognition (LFR), which has been helping them to catch criminals including murderers and rapists quickly and accurately. But it is important that the police use it appropriately.

Its use is subject to data protection, human rights, and equalities laws, which means that it can only be used for a policing purpose, where necessary, proportionate and fair.

The College of Policing has published an Authorised Professional Practice (APP) on police use of LFR. The APP includes details on when the police can use it, the categories of people they can look for, the requirement for immediate deletion of unmatched biometric data, and the need for a Data Protection Impact Assessment.

Following a possible alert, it is always a police officer on the ground who will decide what action, if any, to take; all deployments are targeted, intelligence-led, time-bound, and geographically limited; and before a deployment, the police will inform the public where they intend to use the technology and where they can obtain more information on its use. If the LFR system does not make a match with the watchlist of wanted individuals, the person’s biometric data is deleted immediately and automatically.