Tech
Home Office launches police facial recognition consultation | Computer Weekly
The Home Office has formally opened a consultation on the use of facial recognition by UK police, saying the government is committed to introducing a legal framework that sets out clear rules for the technology.
Initially announced by policing minister Sarah Jones in early October 2025, the 10-week consultation will allow interested parties and members of the public to share their views on how the controversial technology should be regulated.
While the use of live facial recognition (LFR) by police – beginning with the Met’s deployment at Notting Hill Carnival in August 2016 – has ramped up massively in recent years, there has so far been minimal public debate or consultation, with the Home Office claiming for years that there is already “comprehensive” legal framework in place.
The Home Office has now said that although a “patchwork” legal framework for police facial recognition exists (including for the increasing use of the retrospective and “operator-initiated” versions of the technology), it does not give police themselves the confidence to “use it at significantly greater scale … nor does it consistently give the public the confidence that it will be used responsibly”.
It added that the current rules governing police LFR use are “complicated and difficult to understand”, and that an ordinary member of the public would be required to read four pieces of legislation, police national guidance documents and a range of detailed legal or data protection documentation from individual forces to fully understand the basis for LFR use on their high streets.
The Home Office further added that it will consider whether any new framework would also cover the police use of “other biometric and inferential technologies”, including voice and gait recognition, as well as emotion detection algorithms that can “help police spot behaviour associated with criminal activity” or identify suicidal intent in members of the public.
“Although police use of facial recognition has prompted the government to examine the law in this area, other technologies with similar characteristics pose similar questions, such as in what circumstances can their use be justified?” it said. “This consultation therefore asks more broadly about principles that could be applied to a wider range of technologies, which all have the potential to interfere with people’s rights.”
Legislative regime
However, the Home Office noted that “any covert (secret) uses of these types of technology would be subject to a strict legislative regime, notably in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000”, and are therefore not part of the consultation.
The Home Office has said that any new laws informed by the consultation would take about two years to be passed by Parliament.
Responding to the consultation launch, human rights group Liberty – which won the first legal challenge against police use of the tech in August 2020 – urged the government to halt the expansion of police facial recognition while the consultation is taking place, and specified the types of safeguards it believes would protect the public.
This includes ensuring there is independent sign-off before facial recognition is used, limiting its uses to preventing imminent threats to life, searching for missing persons and only searching for people suspected of committing serious offences.
Liberty added that the police should be forced to give at least 14-days advance warning of live facial recognition deployments, except when there is an urgent need to do otherwise. “The public is finally getting a chance to have its say on this surveillance tech, but it’s disappointing the Home Office is starting a consultation with a pledge to ramp up its use,” said Liberty director Akiko Hart.
“Facial recognition cameras are powerful pieces of new technology that enable the police to track and monitor every one of us while we go about our day-to-day lives,” she said. “Police forces have been able to make up their own rules for too long – and just this week we learned these cameras have been used to target children as young as 12.
“The government must halt the rapid roll-out of facial recognition technology, and make sure there are safeguards in place to protect each of us and prioritise our rights – something we know the public wants.”
Nuala Polo, UK public policy lead at the Ada Lovelace Institute, added that while the consultation is welcome, focusing solely on policing risks creates dangerous regulatory gaps that leave people unprotected.
“Private companies are already deploying biometric technologies like FRT and fingerprint scanning in retail chains, workplaces and schools,” she said. “Meanwhile, a new generation of equally invasive biometrics are being rolled out in public spaces to infer people’s emotions, intentions and attention – despite low levels of scientific validity.
“Any forthcoming legislation must encompass the full spectrum of biometrics, not just police use of FRT, to ensure these powerful technologies are used safely and proportionately.”
There have been repeated calls from both Parliament and civil society over many years for the police’s use of facial recognition to be regulated.
This includes three separate inquiries by the Justice and Home Affairs Committee into shoplifting, police algorithms and police facial recognition; two of the UK’s former biometrics commissioners, Paul Wiles and Fraser Sampson; an independent legal review by Matthew Ryder QC; the UK’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission; and the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which called for a moratorium on live facial recognition as far back as July 2019.
More recently, the Ada Lovelace Institute published a report in May 2025 that said the UK’s patchwork approach to regulating biometric surveillance technologies is “inadequate”, placing fundamental rights at risk and ultimately undermining public trust.
The T10 also includes a voice-cloning feature similar to those offered by the Vasco Q1 and the Google Pixel 10. With this function, you recite a few sample sentences, press the “clone” button, and in a few minutes, you can have the T10 speak in a simulacrum of your own voice instead of its generic “male” or “female” tones. This system is much more impressive than Vasco’s, based on my testing, with my cloned voice sounding eerily like my own, just with a rich Spanish, Russian, or Tamil accent applied. Note that by default, the app can only store one cloned voice at a time.
The 60-mAh battery charges via USB-C and promises 15 hours of continuous usage and 100 days of standby time. That’s tough to test thoroughly, as the device automatically shuts itself off after just a few minutes of disuse. Despite many hours of testing over several days, the in-app battery indicator never wavered from a 100-percent charge.
The Subscription Push
The T10 is a capable, if complex, translation system, and I’d be more enamored with it if not for the fact that it includes only 180 days of service before you are pressed to upgrade to one of two subscription plans. For $14 per month or $100 per year, you receive 600 minutes per month of service across many of its real-time features. For $25 per month or $179 per year, that moves up to unlimited service (and adds a second voice cloning slot). Without a subscription, users get just 120 minutes of real-time translations per month and lose call translation and AI Mind Map features completely. The cross-app translation feature, face-to-face mode, and text/photo translations are free across all modes.
Another major issue I had with the T10 is how rough the InnAIO Pro app is. The badly translated interface is particularly troubling, not just because a good portion of it is in pidgin English but because some of it isn’t translated at all. For example, if you save a recording of a real-time translation session, the identities of the two languages used in the recording appear in Chinese.
The T10 has a novel approach and some unique features you won’t find in competing gear or on a phone app, but at present, it’s all too haphazard and undercooked to wholly recommend. The push for a very costly subscription after such a short period of free access makes that calculus all the more difficult.
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A coalition of countries has provided Ukraine with more than €1.3bn of telecommunications, information technology and other high-tech equipment since Russia began the deadliest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
Although €1.3bn may be small compared with Ukraine’s military budget, the equipment – provided with the support of Western governments and companies – has been critical to allow Ukraine’s government and institutions to continue functioning under Russian attack.
Heli Tiirmaa-Klaar, chair of the IT Coalition Steering Group, told Computer Weekly that with peace talks floundering in Moscow, the group is prepared for a long game, and is ready to support Ukraine’s technology infrastructure for the next five or, if necessary, 10 years.
Russia’s attempts to use “well crafted” cyber attacks to destabilise Ukraine just before troops crossed the border were largely unsuccessful, she told Computer Weekly.
Speaking ahead of a talk at the SANS CyberThreat Summit in London, Tiirmaa-Klaar said that Russian attacks included a widely reported attempt to deploy wiper software to destroy data on Ukraine’s critical computer systems.
Ukraine had the support networks in place to patch the zero-day vulnerabilities used in the attack in a matter of hours.
An attack by Russia on Ukraine’s train network the day before Russian troops crossed the boarder also failed, said Tiirmaa-Klaar. “By the time the invasion happened, and you needed to evacuate, the trains were running again,” she said. The defence was good enough and resilient enough, and that is why we could not see major cyber disruptions during the invasion.
“The Ukrainians were quite successful, especially in the early days of the conflict, keeping the lights on, keeping the phones working, the trains running and other critical services running despite major cyber attacks,” said Tiirmaa-Klaar.
Ukraine was able to prepare in advance by moving government data to cloud systems run by the major hyperscalers. It meant that even if data was destroyed during the war, there were backups available.
Russia behind ‘hybrid attacks’
Since Russia launched its military action, cyber attacks are no longer a Russian priority in Ukraine. Tiirmaa-Klaar added: “The Russian rationale would be, ‘Why do we need to cyber bomb if we can actually bomb?’
“Their main goal is political, and the main means for them is still the military – troops on the ground and tanks rolling over the border,” she said. “They don’t see hybrid warfare and cyber as key capabilities once they have decided to invade.”
Moscow is widely believed to be behind drones and balloon incursions that have disrupted airports in Europe, and the sabotage of undersea communications cables.
“I think this is the old tactic of creating disruptions, testing the response and trying to influence public opinion … to show that [Russia] can bring the war closer to you if you continue to support Ukraine,” said Tiirmaa-Klaar.
Information wars
Tiirmaa-Klaar said the media has also played a part in amplifying Russia’s disruption tactics, by over-publicising the disruption caused by suspected Russian drones in some Western countries.
“The way the journalists responded was a dream for Russian operatives because they just spread chaos,” she said.
The tactic is called “reflexive control” – setting up the conditions so that an enemy responds the way Russia intended. “You create the decision-making ground,” explained Tiirmaa-Klaar. “You can anticipate their next steps because you know how your actions are going to influence them.”
Fighting hybrid warfare poses a tougher challenge than fighting cyber attacks, she added. It will need government agencies, the military and civilians to collaborate in new ways.
Tiirmaa-Klaar pointed to Finland’s response to a Russian ship suspected of cutting critical cable links between Estonia and Finland last year as an example of the type of response needed.
Finland boarded the ship and arrested the crew, and it sent an important political message, she said: “You mess with us, and we mess with you. If we respond properly, if we get our act together, then we diminish the probability that we will be influenced by these hybrid operations.”
The IT Coalition Steering Group Tiirmaa-Klaar chairs was established during the first few weeks of Russia’s second invasion against Ukraine, in February 2022.
A US initiative led to the Ramstein Coalition, which today brings together 56 countries – including European Union and Nato members – to provide military support to Ukraine.
Some 10 subgroups provide support in areas ranging from maritime equipment, to artillery, drones and de-mining. Tiirmaa-Klaar chairs the IT coalition, a group of 18 countries which provides Ukraine with hardware, software, tactical communications cyber defences and IT hardware.
Military procurement is notoriously slow, so the IT coalition focuses on dual-use devices, such as laptops, tactical radio communications equipment and satellite communications technology.
Ukraine has “a very long list” of equipment that it needs, which is constantly updated. Every time there is a battle, essential equipment including radios and computer equipment is lost and will need replacing.
There are also logistical challenges ensuring that equipment reaches the front line, which might be more than 2,000km away.
Old phone masts could help Ukraine
A priority is to source decommissioned mobile phone masts that could be used to provide Ukraine with military communications. The group is also supplying equipment for the Ukrainian military to build datacentres and private clouds.
Tiirmaa-Klaar is far from optimistic that the current peace talks brokered by the US will bring a quick end to the conflict. “Putin has no interest, as far as I can see, in ending the war,” she said.
The IT coalition is prepared, with a three-year plan, a five-year plan, and – if necessary – a 10-year plan.
“We will go on even after peace is signed, because if peace is signed, we do not know how long it will hold,” said Tiirmaa-Klaar. “And the Ukrainian armed forces still need to build up capabilities, even in peace time, because they need to have credible deterrence.”
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