The Metropolitan Police has announced it is going to use Live Facial Recognition (LFR) in London. The controversial technique involves officers sitting in a public place and filming the people who walk past. Their faces are automatically compared to pictures in a database of wanted criminals and the police are alerted if there is a match. A few days earlier, the New York Times reported that a company called ClearView AI has developed a facial recognition tool that allows law enforcement agencies in the US to match images or video footage with photos from the internet.

According to the front page of yesterday’s Guardian, the NHS is to start selling our confidential medical records. Every doctor has a duty to keep patient-identifiable data secure, and only share it as far as is in the patient’s immediate best interests. At the same time, in order to run healthcare organisations or to carry out medical research, it is necessary to compile statistics about diseases and treatments. It therefore makes sense for some information collected in the course of caring for patients to be made more widely available – shared with managers, bureaucrats and researchers – but only if it is anonymised.