One of Britain’s biggest retailers started to use biometric cameras that scan the faces of shoppers and check them against a database of suspected criminals.
Staff at the retail empire Frasers Group, the owner of Sports Direct and fashion chain Flannels, are alerted as soon as the facial recognition cameras identify an offender so they can either escort them from the shop or closely monitor them.
Civil liberties campaigners claim that millions of shoppers will be subjected to “Orwellian surveillance” while crime experts say retail chains are being forced to take action amid an “epidemic” of shoplifting and police’s failure to arrest thieves.
As shoplifting has rocketed from 2.9 million incidents in 2016/17 to 7.9 million last year, according to the British Retail Consortium, Daniel Garnham, an ex-police officer and president of the Security Industry Federation, which represents security guards, said police regard shoplifters who steal items worth less than £200 as a “low priority” and will not arrest them.
David McKelvey, a former Detective Chief Inspector at the Metropolitan Police who now runs a private investigations firm, said many retailers “no longer bother calling the police” when criminals target their stores.
An investigation led by campaign group Big Brother Watch identified a string of stores run by Fraser Group that have installed so-called “Facewatch” facial recognition system to detect shoplifters. They included 13 Flannels, 12 Sports Direct and two USC stores.
Under the Facewatch system, cameras scan the faces of all those who enter a shop.
Staff can retain images of those who they “reasonably suspect” have stolen items or committed other crimes and upload them on to a “watchlist”. The images of everyone else are deleted.
The images of so-called “subjects of interest” can be shared with other shops that use Facewatch and are retained for a year unless the suspect is believed to have offended again.
Nick Fisher, the chief executive of Facewatch, said the system is preventing “thousands of crimes a month.”
However, critics question the accuracy of facial recognition technology.
In 2019, an independent report found that software used by the Metropolitan Police to identify potential suspects was wrong in 81% of cases.
Jake Hurfurt, of Big Brother Watch, said the rollout of the cameras in Frasers Group stores was “deeply concerning.”
Frasers Group, which has more than 950 UK stores, has declared that “the rollout continues”, raising the prospect that the technology could soon be commonplace on the high street.
Southern Co-op supermarkets, have also installed the cameras in 34 branches, as have some Spar, Budgens, Costcutter and Nisa stores.
Under data protection laws, companies that capture facial recognition images must ensure that the processing of the information “can be justified as fair, necessary and proportionate.”
The Information Commissioner’s Office said it was “assessing the compliance” of a small number of private companies with the Data Protection Act, with Facewatch “among the organisations under consideration.”
(Source: Daily Mail Online)
