Police accused over use of facial recognition at King Charles’s coronation

Campaigners fear the face-scanning technology could be used against protesters, and that police have done so before.

The Met insisted the technology would not be used to quell lawful protest or target activists. But campaign groups do not believe them. Britain’s biggest force said: “It is not used to identify people who are linked to, or have been convicted of, being involved in protest activity.”

A leading academic expert said the number of people whose faces would be scanned would make it the largest deployment yet of live facial recognition (LFR) in the UK.

The scale of the planned use of LFR was unprecedented, said Pete Fussey, who advises the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner on human rights and ethnics and also led an independent review of the Met’s previous trials of LFR in 2018-19.

The largest previous LFR deployment was the 2017 Notting Hill carnival, when 100,000 faces were scanned.