Amid the recent, dizzying advances in generative AI, it’s been easy to miss the slow but steady progress in facial recognition over the last decade. In the past few months, it has broken containment.
In the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deployed a technology known as Mobile Fortify, which uses facial recognition on officers’ cellphones to “quickly verify subjects of interest during operations.”
In the United Kingdom, the Metropolitan Police scanned 4.2 million people’s faces during 2025 using live facial recognition cameras in public areas across London. And the British government recently promised to further “ramp up facial recognition and biometrics.”
