Revealed: “Skyrocketing” scale of UK police's Secret Facial Recognition Searches of Passport and Immigration Databases

• The Government has secretly allowed police forces to search over 150 million UK passport and immigration database photos with “Orwellian” facial recognition technology for 6 years.
• The number of searches of the passport database has “skyrocketed” from 2 in 2020 to 417 in 2023. 16 searches of the immigration database were made in 2023, increasing almost sevenfold to 102 in 2024.
• Campaigners to institute legal action, claiming it is an “historic breach of the right to privacy”.
• Former minister Sir David Davis MP says “It’s outrageous that parliamentarians and the public have been kept in the dark about this extraordinary surveillance system”.