Electronic surveillance

'We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology

Some countries have embraced the potential of facial recognition. In China, which has about 200m surveillance cameras, it has become a major element of the Xue Liang (Sharp Eyes) programme, which ranks the trustworthiness of citizens and penalises or credits them accordingly. Cameras and checkpoints have been rolled out most intensively in the north-western Xinjiang province, where the Uighur people, a Muslim and minority ethnic group, account for nearly half the population. Face scanners at the entrances of shopping malls, mosques and at traffic crossings allow the government to cross-reference with photos on ID cards to track and control the movement of citizens and their access to phone and bank services.

At the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco became the first major US city to ban police and other agencies from using the technology in May this year, with supervisor Aaron Peskin saying: “We can have good policing without being a police state.”

Meanwhile, the UK government has faced harsh criticism from its own biometrics commissioner, Prof Paul Wiles, who said the technology is being rolled out in a “chaotic” fashion in the absence of any clear laws. Brexit has dominated the political agenda for the past three years; while politicians have looked the other way, more and more cameras are being allowed to look at us.