Facewatch, a facial recognition system already used by more than 100 UK businesses including Sainsbury's, B&M and Spar to monitor suspected thieves, is launching a feature that alerts police in real time when its cameras identify serious offenders. The company says the "UK-first" development, due in autumn, will notify police in an average of four seconds when the "worst offenders" trigger a live match. Civil liberties groups have condemned the move as a "dangerous escalation" towards surveillance and criminalisation in the retail sector, arguing the technology has "shot on far ahead of the regulation".

Critics from Liberty, Open Rights Group, the Ada Lovelace Institute and Big Brother Watch warn that the system is untested and opaque, that it risks summoning police over people who have committed no crime, and that it makes mistakes — with evidence suggesting black and Asian people are more likely to be misidentified. Facewatch says it alerted retailers almost 300,000 times about "known repeat offenders" in the first half of 2026, against a backdrop of 509,566 recorded shoplifting offences in England and Wales in the year to December 2025. Concerns were also raised that the government's planned legal framework for facial recognition would not cover the private sector, creating a "backdoor" partnership with police that is not held to the same standards; use of the technology is set to expand, with Sainsbury's increasing deployment from 55 stores to more than 200 by year's end.