Tech
Landmark legal challenge against police facial recognition begins | Computer Weekly
A judicial review against the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition (LFR) will argue the force is unlawfully deploying the technology across London, without effective safeguards or constraints in place to protect people’s human rights from invasive biometric surveillance.
Brought by anti-knife campaigner Shaun Thompson, who was wrongfully identified by the Met’s system and subject to a prolonged stop as a result, and privacy group Big Brother Watch, the challenge will argue there are no meaningful safeguards in place to effectively limit how the Met uses the technology.
In particular, it will argue the Met’s policy on where it can be deployed and who it can be used to target is so permissive and leaves so much discretion to the force that it cannot be considered “in accordance with law”.
“The reason for the ‘who’ requirement is clear,” wrote Thompson and Big Brother Watch in their skeleton argument for the case. “It serves to protect against people being selected for a watchlist for reasons that are arbitrary, discriminatory or without sufficient basis. As to the ‘where’ requirement, the concern is not with the individuals on the watchlist, but the thousands of innocent people who will have their biometric data taken while going about lawful quotidian activities.”
They added that, as with the “who”, similarly constraining officers’ discretion as to “where” LFR can be used inhibits officers from selecting locations for reasons that are arbitrary, discriminatory, or otherwise have an insufficient basis.
“That is a safeguard against individual officers selecting areas arbitrarily or improperly targeting areas where people of certain races or religions disproportionately live or consistently targeting deprived communities in London,” they wrote, adding that if there are insufficient constraints on “where” LFR can be used, it will be impossible for people to travel across London without their biometric data being captured and processed.
“Any public place risks becoming one in which people’s identities are liable to be checked to see if they are of interest to the police,” they continued. “That would be to fundamentally transform public spaces and people’s relationship with the police.”
Rights breaches
Ultimately, Thompson and Big Brother Watch will argue that the Met’s LFR use breaches the rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly.
This marks the first legal challenge in Europe brought by someone misidentified by facial recognition technology.
After Thompson was wrongly flagged by the technology when travelling through London Bridge, officers detained him while they asked for identity documents, repeatedly demanded fingerprint scans, and inspected him for scars and tattoos.
The police stop continued for over 20 minutes, during which time Thompson was threatened with arrest, despite providing multiple identity documents showing he had been falsely identified.
Thompson, a 39-year-old Black man, described the police’s use of LFR at the time as “stop and search on steroids”.
In August 2020, the Court of Appeal previously found that South Wales Police (SWP) had been deploying LFR unlawfully, on the grounds there were insufficient constraints on the force’s discretion over where LFR could be used, and who could be placed on a watchlist.
“The possibility of being subjected to a digital identity check by police without our consent almost anywhere, at any time, is a serious infringement on our civil liberties that is transforming London,” said Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo ahead of the case being heard.
“When used as a mass surveillance tool, live facial recognition reverses the presumption of innocence and destroys any notion of privacy in our capital. This legal challenge is a landmark step towards protecting the public against intrusive monitoring.”
Legal arguments
On where police can deploy LFR, the Met’s policy documents state the force can deploy LFR cameras at “crime hotspots”, including “access routes” to those hotspots; for “protective security operations”, meaning at public events or critical national infrastructure; and locations based on officers’ intelligence about “the likely location [of] … sought persons”.
However, according to their skeleton argument, Thompson and Big Brother Watch will say the policy does “not meaningfully constrain the discretion as to where LFR can be located”.
It added that while these use cases are intended to circumscribe where the tech can be used, a third-party analysis conducted by Martin Utley – a professor of operational research at University College London – suggests that, in practice, “they confer far too broad a discretion on individual officers, and permit them to deploy LFR anywhere they choose in the significant majority, if not the vast majority, of public spaces in the Metropolitan Police District at any time”.
The argument also added that while the Met’s LFR policy permits officers to designate areas as “crime hotspots” based on “operational experience as to future criminality”, this is “opaque and entirely subjective”.
Utley specifically found that an estimated 47% of the Met’s policing district is labelled as a “crime hotspot”, and that LFR could be deployed on access routes that cover a further 38%, rendering 85% of London open to LFR deployments.
A separate analysis conducted by the Met found that LFR can be located in around 40% of the Metropolitan Police District, compared with Utley’s 47%.
Highlighting how SWP’s use of the tech was found unlawful due to the broad discretion conferred to officers in that case, the argument claims that, taken all together, the Met’s deployment use cases mean that “most of the city is covered”.
“There are two ways LFR can be deployed,” it said. “It can be used in a targeted way. For example, if the police have reasonable grounds to suspect that particular individuals were going to engage in violence at a football game, they could be placed on a watchlist and LFR used to detect their presence in the vicinity.
“Or LFR can be deployed in a mass and untargeted way, selecting areas where a very large number of people are likely to pass and using a very large watchlist, in the hope that someone on the list will happen to pass by.
“It was precisely such mass and untargeted use that concerned the CA [Court of Appeal] in Bridges [the case against SWP], which discretion it considered had to be constrained.”
Unlike the case against SWP’s LFR use, however, which sought to determine the proportionality of the interferences with a specific person’s individual rights on the two occasions his biometric information was captured by the system, the judicial review seeks to challenge the lawfulness of the technology’s mass use.
“For the purpose of the IAWL [in accordance with law] requirement it is critical if there is mass use of LFR to repeatedly process the biometric data of millions of people with the capacity to transform public spaces,” it said. “When considering what is required in terms of constraints and safeguards to ensure a measure is IAWL, the Court must consider, among other things, the number of people a measure affects, and not a single individual’s rights.”
The Met, on the other hand, will argue that the public are “generally at liberty to avoid the relevant LFR area”, and that as individuals’ “familiarity” with LFR increases, it can be considered less rights-intrusive.
The force will also argue that, because officers’ discretion around LFR deployments is not unconstrained, the case is not an IAWL issue, asserting that “so long as the Court is satisfied there is not unfettered discretion on the constable deciding where to locate LFR, [there] is not a maintainable legality challenge.”
The Met added that because “there are no parts of the Policy that allow unfettered discretion for an officer to add whomever he or she wants to a watchlist or place the LFR camera wherever he or she wishes … there is no maintainable attack on the Policy as lacking the quality of law”.
In essence, the Met claims that questions about the breadth of officers’ discretion relate only to the proportionality of its approach, rather than its overall lawfulness.
Lack of primary legislation
The landmark legal challenge against LFR is being heard just a matter of weeks after the UK government pledged to “ramp up” the police use of facial recognition and biometrics.
While the use of LFR by police – beginning with the Met’s deployment at Notting Hill Carnival in August 2016 – has already 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.
However, in December 2025, the Home Office launched a 10-week consultation on the use of LFR by UK police, allowing interested parties and members of the public to share their views on how the controversial technology should be regulated.
The department has 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 documents from individual forces to fully understand the basis for LFR use on their high streets.
There have also 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.
In August 2025, after being granted permission to intervene in the judicial review of the Met’s LFR use, the UK’s equality watchdog said the force is using the technology unlawfully, citing the need for its deployments to be necessary, proportionate and respectful of human rights.
There’s a lever on the back for this compression mechanism that you manually press down and a separate button to open the dustbin at the bottom. You can use the compression lever when it’s both closed and open. It did help compress the hair and dust while I was vacuuming, helping me see if I had really filled the bin, though at a certain point it doesn’t compress much more. It was helpful to push debris out if needed too, versus the times I’ve had to stick my hand in both the Dyson and Shark to get the stuck hair and dust out. Dyson has this same feature on the Piston Animal V16, which is due out this year, so I’ll be curious to see which mechanism is better engineered.
Bendable Winner: Shark
Photograph: Nena Farrell
If you’re looking for a vacuum that can bend to reach under furniture, I prefer the Shark to the Bosch. Both have a similar mechanism and feel, but the Bosch tended to push debris around when I was using it with an active bend, while the Shark managed to vacuum up debris I couldn’t get with the Bosch without lifting it and placing it on top of that particular debris (in this case, rogue cat kibble).
Accessory Winner: Dyson
Dyson pulls ahead because the Dyson Gen5 Detect comes with three attachments and two heads. You’ll get a Motorbar head, a Fluffy Optic head, a hair tool, a combination tool, and a dusting and crevice tool that’s actually built into the stick tube. I love that it’s built into the vacuum so that it’s one less separate attachment to carry around, and it makes me more likely to use it.
But Bosch does well in this area, too. You’ll get an upholstery nozzle, a furniture brush, and a crevice nozzle. It’s one more attachment than you’ll get with Shark, and Bosch also includes a wall mount that you can wire the charging cord into for storage and charging, and you can mount two attachments on it. But I will say, I like that Shark includes a simple tote bag to store the attachments in. The rest of my attachments are in plastic bags for each vacuum, and keeping track of attachments is the most annoying part of a cordless vacuum.
Build Winner: Tie
Photograph: Nena Farrell
All three of these vacuums have a good build quality, but each one feels like it focuses on something different. Bosch feels the lightest of the three and stands up the easiest on its own, but all three do need something to lean against to stay upright. The Dyson is the worst at this; it also needs a ledge or table wedged under the canister, or it’ll roll forward and tip over. The Bosch has a sleek black look and a colorful LED screen that will show you a picture of carpet or hardwood depending on what mode it’s vacuuming in. The vacuum head itself feels like the lightest plastic of the bunch, though.
Tech
Right-Wing Gun Enthusiasts and Extremists Are Working Overtime to Justify Alex Pretti’s Killing
Brandon Herrera, a prominent gun influencer with over 4 million followers on YouTube, said in a video posted this week that while it was unfortunate that Pretti died, ultimately the fault was his own.
“Pretti didn’t deserve to die, but it also wasn’t just a baseless execution,” Herrera said, adding without evidence that Pretti’s purpose was to disrupt ICE operations. “If you’re interfering with arrests and things like that, that’s a crime. If you get in the fucking officer’s way, that will probably be escalated to physical force, whether it’s arresting you or just getting you the fuck out of the way, which then can lead to a tussle, which, if you’re armed, can lead to a fatal shooting.” He described the situation as “lawful but awful.”
Herrera was joined in the video by former police officer and fellow gun influencer Cody Garrett, known online as Donut Operator.
Both men took the opportunity to deride immigrants, with Herrera saying “every news outlet is going to jump onto this because it’s current thing and they’re going to ignore the 12 drunk drivers who killed you know, American citizens yesterday that were all illegals or H-1Bs or whatever.”
Herrera also referenced his “friend” Kyle Rittenhouse, who has become central to much of the debate about the shooting.
On August 25, 2020, Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, traveled from his home in Illinois to a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, brandishing an AR-15-style rifle, claiming he was there to protect local businesses. He killed two people and shot another in the arm that night.
Critics of ICE’s actions in Minneapolis quickly highlighted what they saw as the hypocrisy of the right’s defense of Rittenhouse and attacks on Pretti.
“Kyle Rittenhouse was a conservative hero for walking into a protest actually brandishing a weapon, but this guy who had a legal permit to carry and already had had his gun removed is to some people an instigator, when he was actually going to help a woman,” Jessica Tarlov, a Democratic strategist, said on Fox News this week.
Rittenhouse also waded into the debate, writing on X: “The correct way to approach law enforcement when armed,” above a picture of himself with his hands up in front of police after he killed two people. He added in another post that “ICE messed up.”
The claim that Pretti was to blame was repeated in private Facebook groups run by armed militias, according to data shared with WIRED by the Tech Transparency Project, as well as on extremist Telegram channels.
“I’m sorry for him and his family,” one member of a Facebook group called American Patriots wrote. “My question though, why did he go to these riots armed with a gun and extra magazines if he wasn’t planning on using them?”
Some extremist groups, such as the far-right Boogaloo movement, have been highly critical of the administration’s comments on being armed at a protest.
“To the ‘dont bring a gun to a protest’ crowd, fuck you,” one member of a private Boogaloo group wrote on Facebook this week. “To the fucking turn coats thinking disarming is the answer and dont think it would happen to you as well, fuck you. To the federal government who I’ve watched murder citizens just for saying no to them, fuck you. Shall not be infringed.”
It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Aside from a few outliers (looking at you, Peter Thiel), almost everyone in the tech world was shocked and appalled. At a conference I attended that Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was “a pretty crazy idea” to think that his company had anything to do with the outcome. The following Saturday, I was leaving my favorite breakfast place in downtown Palo Alto when I ran into Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. We knew each other, but at that point, I had never really sat down with him to do a deep interview. But this was a moment when raw emotions were triggering all sorts of conversations, even between journalists and famously cautious executives. We ended up talking for what must have been 20 minutes.
I won’t go into the particulars of a private conversation. But it will surprise no one to hear what was mutually understood on that streetcorner: We were two people stunned at what had happened and shared the same unspoken belief that it was not good.
I have thought back to that day many times, certainly last year when Cook gifted President Trump a glitzy Apple sculpture with a 24k gold base, and most recently this past weekend when he attended a White House screening of the $40 million vanity documentary about Melania Trump. The event, which also included Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (whose company funded the project) and AMD CEO Lisa Su, took place only hours after the Trump administration’s masked army in Minneapolis put 10 bullets into 37-year-old Department of Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti. Also, a snowstorm was coming, which would have provided a good excuse to miss an event that might very well haunt its attendees for the rest of their lives. But there was Cook, feting a competitor’s media product, looking sharp in a tuxedo, and posing with the movie’s director, who hadn’t worked since he was accused of sexual misconduct or harassment by half a dozen women. (He has denied the allegations.)
Cook’s presence reflects the behavior of many of his peers in the trillion-dollar tech CEO club, all of whom run businesses highly vulnerable to the president’s potential ire. During Trump’s first term, CEOs of companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google straddled a tightrope between objecting to policies that violated their company’s values and cooperating with the federal government. In the past year, however, their default strategy, executed with varying degrees of enthusiasm, has been to lavishly flatter the president and cut deals where Trump can claim wins. These executives have also funneled millions toward Trump’s inauguration, his future presidential library, and the humongous ballroom that he is building to replace the demolished East Wing of the White House. In return, the corporate leaders hoped to blunt the impact of tariffs and avoid onerous regulations.
This behavior disappointed a lot of people, including me. When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, he was seen as a civic hero, but now he is molding the opinion pages of that venerable institution into that of a White House cheerleader. Zuckerberg once cofounded a group that advocated for immigration reform and penned an op-ed bemoaning the uncertain future of a young entrepreneur he was coaching who happened to be undocumented. Last year, Zuckerberg formally cut ties with the group, but by then he had already positioned himself as a Trump toady.
When Googlers protested Trump’s immigration policies during his first term, cofounder Sergey Brin joined their march. “I wouldn’t be where I am today or have any kind of the life that I have today if this was not a brave country that really stood out and spoke for liberty,” said Brin, whose family had escaped Russia when he was 6. Today, families like his are being pulled out of their cars and classrooms, sent to detention centers, and flown out of the country. Brin and fellow cofounder Larry Page built their search engine on the kind of government grant that the Trump administration no longer supports. Nonetheless, Brin is a Trump supporter. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, himself an immigrant, oversaw Google’s $22 million contribution to the White House ballroom and was among tech grandees flattering Trump at a September White House dinner where CEOs competed to see who could pander to Trump the most insincerely. Another immigrant, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, once slammed Trump’s first-term policies as “cruel and abusive.” In 2025, he was among those offering hosannas to the president.
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