Police To Use Facial Recognition At Champions League Final
The UEFA Champions League, taking place on 3rd June 2017, will see police in Wales conduct a face recognition trial that could scan every one of the 170,000 expected visitors.
Faces will be scanned at the Principality Stadium and Cardiff’s central railway station, meaning visitors don’t even have to be attending the match. They will be scanned against a database of 500,000 ‘custody images’ stored by local police forces.
The operation will build on previous police use of Automated Facial Recognition, or AFR technology, by London’s Metropolitan Police during 2016’s Notting Hill Carnival.
The contract says that real-time facial recognition is planned to be used “in and round the Principality Stadium and Cardiff central train station on the day of the UCL Champions League Final”.
South Wales Police will have to honour the country’s usage guidelines, meaning that officers are only taking as much information as they really need and will be transparent with data they collect.
“The UEFA Champions League finals in Cardiff give us a unique opportunity to test and prove the concept of this technology in a live operational environment, which will hopefully prove the benefits and the application of such technology across policing,” the force said in a statement.
“This will be one of the largest security operations ever undertaken in the Welsh capital and the use of technology will support the policing operation which aims to keep people safe during what will be a very busy time in Cardiff.”
A report on the plan can be found on Motherboard, here.
Image: ©Getty Images
