Facial-recognition: How Sports Direct and Spar are using Chinese-made cameras ... trends now
Sports Direct, Spar, Budgens, Costcutter and Southern Co-op are now among the growing number of British retailers using a controversial Chinese state-owned facial-recognition system.
The biometric cameras work by scanning the faces of shoppers so they can be checked against a database of suspected criminals.
But they have been branded 'Orwellian' and 'unlawful' by critics, who claim that staff could add people to a secret 'blacklist' without them knowing.
So how does the facial-recognition system work, and which shops are already using it?
Here, MailOnline breaks down everything you need to know about the controversial technology.
Sports Direct, Spar, Budgens, Costcutter and Southern Co-op are now among the growing number of British retailers using Chinese state-owned facial-recognition cameras (pictured)
How does it work?
Facewatch, the UK firm which supplies the Chinese-made cameras, claims that its surveillance system is 97.8 per cent accurate at recognising faces.
It has previously stressed that its database only retains images of previous offenders, and none of these have been shared with police.
Under the Facewatch system, cameras scan the faces of all those who enter a shop.
These are then checked against a database of suspected criminals and if there is a match, the technology instantly sends an alert to the shop.
Staff can also retain images of those who they 'reasonably suspect' have stolen items or committed other crimes and upload them on to a 'watchlist' that is shared with other shops that use Hikvision cameras.
All of these so-called 'subjects of interest' images are kept for a year in the Facewatch database, unless the suspect is believed to have offended again.
The images of everyone else are deleted.
Under data protection laws, companies that capture facial recognition images must ensure that the processing of the information 'can be justified as fair, necessary and proportionate'.
Where is it used?
Independent grocery chain Southern Co-op has installed the cameras in 35 stores across Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Southampton and London.
An investigation by campaign group Big Brother Watch, shared exclusively with The Mail on Sunday, also identified a string of stores run by Frasers Group that have installed the so-called 'Facewatch' facial recognition system to detect shoplifters.
They included 13 Flannels, 12 Sports Direct and two USC stores.
Staff at Sports Direct – controlled by billionaire Mike Ashley – are alerted as soon as the artificial intelligence cameras identify an offender so they can either escort them from the shop or closely monitor them
Southern Co-Op is independent of the larger Co-op chain but runs more than 200 stores in southern England under the same brand. Pictured: a Southern Co-Op in Alresford, Hampshire
Some Spar, Budgens, Costcutter and Nisa shops are also using them.
Staff at the Sports Direct retail empire – controlled by billionaire Mike Ashley – are alerted as soon as the artificial intelligence cameras identify an offender so they can either escort them from the shop or closely monitor them.
The company,
