Big Brother Watch has repeatedly warned that the UK is quietly creeping into a surveillance state. Live facial recognition is being deployed across streets, train stations, shopping centres and even at public protests. But this technology is not just targeting criminals. It is scanning millions of innocent people without their knowledge or consent.
False alarms with real consequences
Studies show that the vast majority of facial recognition matches are false. According to Big Brother Watch, in 80 deployments across the UK, 89.7% of alerts were false positives. In London alone, 150 out of 173 matches by the Metropolitan Police were incorrect, resulting in an error rate of nearly 87%. In some cases, people were stopped, searched or fingerprinted as a result.
These mistakes are not harmless. They are invasive, humiliating and difficult to challenge.
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It is all connected
Facial images from passports, CCTV, phones and even social media are increasingly fed into large government and private databases. Big Brother Watch has raised concerns that a digital pound or central bank digital currency would allow the state to track every payment in real time. Combined with facial recognition and phone surveillance, this creates a fullmap of your movements, your spending and your associations.
Your phone is not private
Every step we take with a smartphone in our pocket feeds data to corporations and authorities. Location, biometrics, browsing history and more. If that is tied to payment systems and real time identity scanning, we move closer to a system where everything we do can be watched, recorded and judged.
Know Your Customer (KYC) rules are already mandating identity checks for basic services. This is not theoretical. It is happening now.
Where does this lead?
The future we are heading toward is one of forced compliance. A world in which you are monitored constantly. In which you are guilty until proven innocent. In which dissent is quietly suppressed by the knowledge that you are being watched.
We are at a turning point
If we do not push back, we risk building a society where privacy is gone, autonomy is restricted, and control is centralised in the name of convenience and safety. This goes far beyond retail surveillance. It marks the steady build up of a digital infrastructure designed for monitoring and control.
It's 1984
George Orwell warned of a future where every move was watched, every word monitored, and every thought shaped by fear. But even he did not imagine a world where your money could be used to control you.
With facial recognition and CBDCs combined, we are building something even more invasive than Orwell foresaw, a system where surveillance is not just constant but transactional, embedded into the very fabric of daily life.
When every face is scanned, every step tracked, and every payment recorded, we are not living freely. We are living under watch.
Thank you to Big Brother Watch for continuing to shine a light on these issues and holding power to account.
