TfL announces facial recognition cameras to be trialled on the London Underground

Transport for London (TfL) has announced that it is supporting the British Transport Police (BTP) in deploying live facial recognition (LFR) cameras at select London Underground stations, beginning at Victoria station on Tuesday, 11 August. The technology aims to identify individuals on police watchlists to assist in capturing high-harm offenders wanted for sexual offences, robbery, and knife crime.

The trial expands on BTP's railway station LFR operations, launched in February. According to BTP's deployment logs, between February and July, LFR technology scanned over 530,000 faces across 18 deployments at major train stations, resulting in zero true matches, no arrests, and one false identification.

The Underground trial will operate within clearly signed areas, enabling passengers to choose alternative routes. TfL confirmed that images of individuals who do not match the watchlist will be automatically and immediately deleted. 

In a statement responding to the news, Silkie Carlo, director of the digital rights group Big Brother Watch (BBW), said: "This is a disturbing and dystopian expansion of live facial recognition that will capture millions of innocent people’s faces. Far from reserving this for exceptional cases, British police are now using live facial recognition routinely in the sort of pervasive way you might expect in China but not in a democracy.

"This is error-ridden, AI surveillance technology that treats the public like suspects and turns us into walking ID cards. In British Transport Police’s trials this year, they achieved a 100% fail rate, checking over half a million commuters’ faces only to trigger one alert which was a misidentification.

"British Transport Police should get back to proper policing and stop using AI surveillance tech that belongs in dystopian fiction."

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