” the idea that mass scanning of faces in public should become routine ought to alarm anyone who values freedom over convenience”
The Metropolitan Police are proposing a major expansion of live facial-recognition surveillance across London, claiming success after nearly a thousand arrests linked to the technology. Their public consultation, proudly cited by the force, apparently found that 85% of respondents support the use of facial recognition to catch serious criminals.
On the surface, it sounds persuasive – a high-tech answer to crime. But the idea that mass scanning of faces in public should become routine ought to alarm anyone who values freedom over convenience. Let’s not forget that it is little coincidence that facial recognition is being rolled out in tandem with digital ID – the two systems will surely be linked, meaning walking down the high street to get a pint of milk becomes the equivalent of walking through passport control.
In a free society, the presumption of innocence is not negotiable. Yet facial-recognition systems function by presuming the opposite: that everyone passing a camera deserves to be checked against a criminal database. The innocent are monitored not because of what they’ve done, but because they exist in public. That logic turns civic life into a police line-up and erodes one of the oldest protections in liberal civilisation – that the citizen need not justify their innocence to The State.
“In a free society, the presumption of innocence is not negotiable. Yet facial-recognition systems function by presuming the opposite”
Proponents point to reassuring statistics: the Metropolitan Police claim a false-match rate of just 0.0003 % from millions of scans. But even such a tiny error, multiplied across a city of millions, produces hundreds of wrongful alerts and unjustified interventions. More troubling still, eight in ten false matches involved black individuals, underscoring that algorithmic bias is not a theoretical risk but a measurable injustice. To shrug off these flaws because the “majority supports the policy” is to forget that liberty is not subject to opinion polls.
Beyond the technical debates lies a deeper constitutional one: who authorises this surveillance, and who restrains its use once normalised? There was no vote in parliament, no consultation when 46 million of our passport photos were uploaded to a database under the last Conservative government. Without strict legal boundaries and independent oversight, any promise of restraint will vanish under the pressure of convenience. History shows that powers granted to police in the name of safety are rarely surrendered voluntarily.
“who authorises this surveillance, and who restrains its use once normalised?”
The state’s duty to protect citizens does not extend to treating every citizen as a potential suspect. For libertarians, that principle defines the moral boundary of government. A society that trades privacy for marginal gains in policing may find that it loses both — liberty first, and trust soon after.
In the end, the expansion of facial-recognition surveillance is not progress – it is the dismantling of the presumption of innocence, one scan at a time.
Alex Zychowski – Libertarian Party UK
You can learn more about the Libertarian party at https://libertarianpartyuk.com/, follow Alex on X/ Twitter @alexzychowski or email him at alex.zychowski@libertarianpartyuk.com.
Originally posted on 4th November at https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17cc8Hmbye/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Main image from Grok.