British Transport Police switched on live facial recognition inside a Tube station for the first time on Tuesday 11 August, starting at Victoria. Cameras convert every passing face into a numeric template and check it against a watchlist of people wanted by police or the courts, deleting non-matches automatically. The pilot now runs to November.
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Transcript
Facial recognition went live inside a London Underground station this morning. Victoria. British Transport Police have been running this trial since February, but only on mainline concourses, and that distinction actually mattered. A camera van on a street corner is something you can walk around. A Tube gateline is not. Every legal defence of this technology leans on the idea that it's avoidable. At Victoria, avoiding it means not travelling. Here's what happens when you walk through. The camera finds your face. Your face becomes a string of numbers. Those numbers get checked against a watchlist of people wanted by police or the courts. No match, and it's deleted in about a second. A match, and an officer decides whether to stop you. The trial runs to November. There is still no law in England and Wales written specifically for any of it.