British passport and immigration databases are being used by police forces for mass facial recognition without any clear legal basis and for the most part without the public or parliament’s knowledge. The government is going a step further and is seeking to give police full access to all driving licence and DVLA photos and databases too. Let’s look at how and why. Facial recognition is used by British police to search the passport and immigration database for possible matches. These searches can involve biometric scans of tens of millions of unsuspecting Brits [FOI request showed]. This is a repeated and unjustified invasion of privacy which has also wrongly identified innocent people as potential suspects in a system that is increasingly Orwellian. The number of searches of the passport database has risen sharply, from just 2 in 2020 to 417 in 2023 [FOI request showed]. It is reasonable to assume it is much higher in 2025. The main concern with this widespread use of facial recognition and misuse of our data is the normalisation of surveillance across society as a whole. What’s particularly alarming is that police facial recognition searches are not confined to those suspected of crimes; they include biometric scans across vast civil databases containing images of people who have never been accused of any wrongdoing. The passport and immigration databases alone hold around 150 million photos, including biometric passport photos, driving licence images, and other identity records. These are used without explicit consent or clear legal frameworks, raising serious questions about privacy and civil liberties. Most of us already know we are tracked online for advertising, video recommendations, and shopping preferences. However, if we know our every move is being tied directly to our real identity, it creates a chilling effect on free speech and behaviour. You no longer need to criminalise speech if people are fearful of what they say under constant state surveillance. This leads to people being too afraid to exercise fundamental rights such as freedom of expression. Moreover, the technology has not been proven faultless. There have been cases where innocent people were misidentified as suspects due to flaws in the facial recognition algorithms combined with the sheer scale of the databases. This wrongful identification can have severe consequences for those individuals, including unwarranted police scrutiny and social stigma. Efforts by civil society groups highlight the secretive use of facial recognition by the authorities, calling it an Orwellian encroachment on everyday freedoms. Despite growing public concern, the government is pushing to expand police access to even more databases, such as those held by the DVLA containing driving licence photographs. Such expansion could turn the entire population into subjects of pervasive biometric surveillance, radically altering the relationship between citizens and the state. In conclusion, the mass use of biometric facial recognition on passport and immigration databases by UK police, without transparent legal oversight or public debate, is a troubling sign of widening surveillance. It risks normalizing intrusive state monitoring that undermines privacy, distorts justice through misidentifications, and chills rights central to democratic society. Additionally, the wider use of these extensive biometric databases increases the risk of significant data breaches, which could expose sensitive personal information of millions of innocent people. Public awareness and political accountability are essential to safeguard our freedoms in the age of advanced biometric technologies.