Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what guidance her Department has issued on the storage, security, sharing, and deletion of data generated through the use of live facial recognition technology.

Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology uses live video footage of people passing an LFR camera in a public place and compares their images to a specific list of people wanted by the police (known as a watchlist).

Police use of facial recognition is governed by data protection, equality, and human rights laws. In addition, they must also comply with the Surveillance Camera Code, College of Policing guidance and all published policing policies. This means the technology can only be used for a policing purpose, where necessary, proportionate, and fair.

Operational guidance is provided by the College of Policing in the form of an Authorised Professional Practice (APP), which sets out when the police can use LFR and the categories of people they can look for and where images they use to compile the watchlist. Following a possible LFR alert, there is a requirement for a specially trained police officer to review it and decide what action, if any, to take. The police must immediately delete the biometric data of anyone the system does not match to the watchlist. The watchlist itself is destroyed after each deployment.