https://media.privacyinternational.org/videos/watch/351c9b07-19f8-4beb-a931-a9d5f11301c6 Freedom of Information (FOI) requests have revealed the rapidly increasing scale of police mass facial recognition searches against the passport and immigration databases. New figures reveal that the number of searches of the passport database has “skyrocketed” from 2 in 2020 to 417 in 2023, and an almost sevenfold increase from 16 searches of the immigration database in 2023, to 102 in 2024. The Home Office and police forces are conducting these searches against over 150 million photos of the public without a clear legal basis, and without informing the public or parliament. Privacy advocates from Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, and Privacy International, Nuno Guerreiro de Sousa, have issued pre-action correspondence to the Home Office and Metropolitan Police and are calling for a moratorium on facial recognition searches of the passport and immigration databases. Learn more by going to https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5635/revealed-skyrocketing-scale-uk-polices-secret-facial-recognition-searches Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:15:01 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://media.privacyinternational.org https://media.privacyinternational.org/lazy-static/avatars/5c7454e0-676b-43a0-8933-4867d0c1f2e6.png https://media.privacyinternational.org/videos/watch/351c9b07-19f8-4beb-a931-a9d5f11301c6 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://media.privacyinternational.org/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.