London, 29 October. People wrongly flagged as shoplifters by facial recognition systems in British shops described their cases at a meeting in Parliament with Labour MP Allison Gardner; the meeting, which neither the system’s developer Facewatch nor the Sainsbury’s chain attended, was organised by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, writes TechRadar, whose reporter was at the meeting.
One man was ordered out of a Home Bargains store when he and his wife popped in to buy vitamins. A woman in Budgens was told she had stolen “loads of meat” the week before, although she had not been to that shop for months. Some were stopped at the door, others at the till with a full basket; one woman was intercepted because the system identified the people walking in right behind her. Finding out why a person ended up on the list, participants said, is almost impossible: shops refer people to the developer, and the developer to the shops.
Facewatch declined to attend, citing the tone of Big Brother Watch’s campaign, and said it takes responsibility for its technology and processes, while retailers are responsible for how their staff treat customers; legal liability, it said, “depends on the facts”. The company believes the campaign creates a disproportionate impression of the risk: by its account, the system operates in thousands of shops every day. Sainsbury’s is currently introducing facial recognition in 200 of its stores. A TechRadar reporter who visited one of them in south London found no way to opt out of scanning. Britain’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, called the victims’ accounts “harrowing” and promised to share its findings on commercial use of the technology soon.
What it means: Private companies in Britain already use facial recognition to keep people out of shops, but neither the law nor the companies give a person wrongly put on a list a clear way to find out why and to get off it.
Who benefits: Retail chains and Facewatch gain protection against theft and a market for the technology. Shoppers wrongly put on a list have, for now, only a cumbersome subject access request under British law, which, according to Big Brother Watch, does not guarantee removal from the list.
Background: Facewatch is a British company that sells shops a system in which cameras at the entrance match visitors’ faces against a list of people the shops themselves suspect of theft and alert security. In Kazakhstan facial recognition is used above all in banks: since 12 July 2026 rules on biometric authentication by financial organisations, approved by the Agency for Regulation and Development of the Financial Market and the National Bank, have been in force: a photo is compared with a reference image from a state database, a liveness check with at least three random commands is mandatory, and the collection, storage and destruction of biometric data must be documented.
