Skip to content

Harry Styles Cardiff Concert: Face recognition to be used on crowd

News imageBBC Facial recognition vanBBC
The van was also used in Cardiff ahead of the Beyonce concert in May

Thousands of fans attending the Harry Styles concert in Cardiff could be scanned by live face recognition cameras deployed in the area by South Wales Police.

The cameras will help identify people wanted for "priority offences".

The technology will be used on both the 20 and 21 June along Queen Street.

Police also used the cameras at the Beyoncé concert and at the Coronation, but the technology has been criticised by human rights campaigners.

Harry Styles fans have been camping overnight in the city centre on Westgate Street, opposite the stadium.

European law-makers recently backed an effective ban on live face recognition cameras in public spaces.

A live face recognition camera works by comparing faces with a "watch list" using Artificial Intelligence.

News imagePeople milling around outside the castle with feather boas and pink cowboy hats
Crowds of people line the streets as fans get ready to welcome Harry Styles to the city

The watchlist could be made up of people who are wanted for crimes, for example.

South Wales Police said that if you were not on a watch list, the biometric data would not be stored and it would be immediately deleted.

The police force also stated on Twitter: "Fully appreciate the concert has a young audience, however concert-goers won't be the only people in the city centre during this time."

News imageTents lined up on Westgate Street in Cardiff, with one person sat by their tent in the bottom right corner
People set up camp on Westgate Street on Monday

The CCTV footage is recorded and kept for up to 31 days.

Allow X content?

This article contains content provided by X. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read  and  before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’.

Big Brother Watch is a UK civil liberties campaign group, and it's legal and policy officer Madeleine Stone, said live facial recognition "a dangerously authoritarian mass surveillance tool that must be banned".

News imageAir beds, chairs and tent line Westgate street
Tents line the street opposite the stadium on Monday afternoon

"South Wales Police's own statistics show live facial recognition to be around 90% inaccurate, meaning this highly intrusive technology is unlikely to have any policing benefits but would have a serious cost to police resources and the public's privacy rights," she said.

"At South Wales Police's last deployment, over 86,000 innocent concertgoers were scanned with zero matches."