Is it legal for police to use live facial recognition technology?

The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says she makes “no apology” for announcing the roll-out of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) to all the police services in England and Wales. Under a government white paper on policing, the number of Live Facial Recognition vans will increase from 10 to 50. Police say it’s groundbreaking technology in the fight against crime, but civil liberties groups say it’s authoritarian and a step towards a "surveillance state". Facial recognition cameras are already used in shops; the difference with LFR is that the software used by police tracks faces against a watchlist - a specific database of faces - from a live video feed. But the legal framework regulating the use of the technology is a patchwork of common law, human rights legislation and police guidelines, which has been challenged in the High Court. There is also concern about a lack of oversight over how police watchlists are compiled, and why the number of people on the list now stretches into the thousands. So is LFR legal? Presenter: Dr Joelle Grogan Producers: Ravi Naik and Charlotte Rowles Editor: Tom Bigwood Contributors: Sonja Jessup, BBC London’s home affairs correspondent Professor Karen Yeung, Interdisciplinary Professorial Fellow in Law, Ethics and Informatics, Birmingham Law School Dr Asress Gikay, Senior Lecturer in AI, Disruptive Innovation and Law, Brunel, University of London Richard Ryan a barrister from Blakiston’s, specialising in drone and unmanned aviation law

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Is it legal for police to use live facial recognition technology? is an episode from Law in Action by BBC.

This episode is 27:37 long.

This episode was published on Mar 11, 2026.

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