Edinburgh Law School researcher awarded funding for live facial recognition governance project

Dr Lachlan Urquhart, Senior Lecturer in Technology Law and Human-Computer Interaction at Edinburgh Law School, and Dr Diana Miranda, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Stirling, who are both directors of the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy (CRISP), have been awarded funding by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research for their research project Face[REC]: Co-Designing Live Facial Recognition Governance.

The project will take place from August 2026 to April 2027, and aims to explore the socio-technical, ethical, and governance impacts of live facial recognition (LFR) use in Scottish policing. 

LFR is a form of artificial intelligence which utilises biometric data and computer vision algorithms to match faces scanned in public spaces with images stored in police databases.

LFR use by police in public spaces has been controversial, leading to numerous UK court cases, as it poses risks to human rights (such as freedom of assembly or privacy), raises data protection concerns, and creates intersectional harms (due to ethnicity, race and gender bias, inaccuracies, and discrimination) (Fussey and Murray; NPL Report). 

Yet many UK police forces already use the technology, and this project aims to explore how Scotland can adopt a higher level of ethics and governance for LFR in policing, to reflect democratic values and human rights concerns. It builds on Dr Urquhart and Dr Miranda’s prior work in on facial surveillance and future technologies in policing.

The project will contribute to debates about regulating LFR by critically analysing the fragmented regulatory landscape within the UK and EU; by engaging with citizens and police using co-design and futures-led methods to understand their concerns; and by designing and evaluating a physical card-deck tool (“the Face[REC] cards|) to enable collective deliberation between policymakers, academics, police, and regulators about the governance of LFR.

Dr Urquhart said: “This is a timely project which explores the interplay between increasing use of LFR by police in public spaces and emerging regulatory standards. Our project will consider different regulatory approaches and provide valuable insights from different stakeholders, particularly citizens and police, to co-design what appropriate and responsible governance should look like now and in the future.”