The Home Office and UK police forces have been accused of conducting large-scale, ‘Orwellian’ facial recognition searches using the country’s passport and immigration databases.

Freedom of Information requests from privacy campaigners Big Brother Watch show that the number of police facial recognition searches of the passport database has skyrocketed from just two in 2020 to 417 in 2023, while searches of the immigration database have gone from sixteen in 2023 to 102 last year.

Campaigners say that searches of these databases, consisting of more than 150 million photos of the public, are taking place without a clear legal basis, and without informing the public or parliament, turning passports into ‘mugshots’ for a ‘giant, Orwellian police database’.

The FOI requests reveal that the passport and immigration databases have been enrolled in a facial recognition library without parliament’s awareness, or any policy in place to govern how and why searches can be undertaken; however, the Home Office stated in legal correspondence with Big Brother Watch that they are working toward introducing a policy.

According to campaigners, there are currently no public policies meaningfully constraining the use of this data, with no requirement that police officers have reasonable grounds for suspecting the people they seek to identify have committed any crime.

“This astonishing revelation shows both our privacy and democracy are at risk from secretive AI policing, and that members of the public are now subject to the inevitable risk of misidentifications and injustice,” said Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch.

“Police officers can secretly take photos from protests, social media, or indeed anywhere and seek to identify members of the public without suspecting us of having committed any crime. This is an historic breach of the right to privacy in Britain that must end.”

The UK’s passport database alone holds over 58 million searchable photographs, while the immigration database is thought to hold around 92 million photographs drawn from visas, immigration requests, and the EU Settlement Scheme.

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Big Brother Watch said that FOI responses indicate police forces are using these databases in an attempt to identify people otherwise unknown to the police, despite already having access to the Police National Database, which holds around 20 million photos of people who have been arrested or are of police interest.

Advocates from Big Brother Watch and Privacy International have issued pre-action correspondence to the Home Office and Metropolitan Police and are calling for a moratorium on any facial recognition searches of the passport and immigration databases.

“For the Home Office to have converted millions of innocent people’s passport photos into a police facial recognition database is bad enough for our freedoms. That the last government allowed this without public debate, let alone parliamentary authority, is a national scandal,” said Labour peer and former shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti.

Human rights group Liberty warned earlier this year that the UK government’s Crime and Policing Bill, currently progressing through the House of Lords, could also open DVLA databases, which house more than 52 million driver records, to facial recognition searches by police.

DIGIT has approached the Home Office for comment.