A group of nearly 50 cross-party MPs and peers have condemned Mike Ashley's Frasers Group over its use of Live Facial Recognition technology in stores.

A report by The Guardian revealed that the MPs co-signed a letter calling on the retail giant, which owns Sports Direct and House of Fraser, to stop the use of the “invasive and discriminatory” technology across its stores.

“Live facial recognition [LFR] technology has well-evidenced issues with privacy, inaccuracy, and race and gender discrimination,” said the letter, which was co-signed by David Davis, John McDonnell, and Tim Farron. “LFR inverts the vital democratic principle of suspicion preceding surveillance and treats everyone who passes the camera like a potential criminal.”

The letter says that Frasers Group obtains the facial biometric data of every customer entering its stores to be checked against a privately created watchlist.

The MPs described the process as equivalent to performing an identity check on every single customer.

The move comes after police in South Wales and London said they will continue to use live facial recognition (LFR) to catch criminals after an independent report into the technology claimed it doesn’t discriminate based on gender, age or race.

South Wales Police chief constable Jeremy Vaughn said that the results of the investigation have “reaffirmed” the force’s commitment to use the technology in public.

But human rights group Liberty hit back at the decision on Twitter, saying that more accurate facial recognition is “not a good thing”.

“Higher accuracy just makes it easier for police to identify, track and monitor you," wrote the non-profit in a Tweet.

Speaking to the Guardian about Frasers Group's use of LFR technology, former shadow home secretary David Davis said: “There are no rules: this is open season on privacy. Just this month, there was a case of Tesla employees getting into trouble because they were misusing photographs from inside the cars. It’s a good demonstration that even if there are promises made, you can never trust the organisation entirely, because human beings are human beings.”

National Technology News has approached Frasers Group for comment.

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