Last month, I wrote about anonymising protest photos to protect activists from facial recognition surveillance. The response was bigger than I expected. Clearly this is something people care about.
But here's the thing: the landscape is shifting fast. What was already concerning has become urgent. The UK government is building something that could fundamentally change what it means to be photographed in public. And if you're documenting protests, sharing activist photos, or just generally exist in Britain, you need to understand what's coming.
Let me explain.
BritCard: What the Government Is Planning
On 25 September 2025, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans for a mandatory digital ID system for all UK residents. The media dubbed it "BritCard." The government says it will be required by 2029.
The stated purpose? Proving your right to work. Streamlining identity verification. Fighting illegal immigration. Saving taxpayers money. The Tony Blair Institute projects annual savings of £1.6 billion through reduced benefit fraud and improved tax collection.
Sounds reasonable on the surface. Who wouldn't want less paperwork?
But here's where it gets complicated. The Home Affairs Committee has stated that digital ID could include biometrics such as fingerprints or facial recognition data. And that changes everything.
Why This Matters for Protest Photography
Let me connect the dots.
Right now, if you photograph a protest and share that image online, someone could potentially identify faces using facial recognition technology. It's already happening. Clearview AI has scraped billions of photos from social media and can match faces from old photos to real identities.
But a national digital ID system with embedded facial recognition data creates something worse: a single, authoritative database linking every British resident's face to their legal identity, employment status, and government records.
Think about that for a moment.
Every photo from every protest becomes a potential match against a government database. Not a grainy social media scrape. A verified, official biometric record. Your face becomes your permanent identifier, and that identifier connects to everything the government knows about you.
It's Already Happening Without the ID Card
Don't think of this as a future threat. It's already here.
In January 2024, the Metropolitan Police deployed facial recognition technology at pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protests in London. Their justification? Some signs and chants might constitute offences. So they scanned everyone.
Following the anti-immigration riots in August 2024, Prime Minister Starmer announced wider deployment of facial recognition technology, comparing it to football hooligan restrictions. The Met Police now plans to deploy live facial recognition up to 10 times a week, up from four deployments over two days.
And here's something chilling: police searches of passport and immigration databases have skyrocketed. From 2 searches in 2020 to 417 in 2023. Campaigners warn that "police officers can secretly take photos from protests, social media, or indeed anywhere and seek to identify members of the public without suspecting us of having committed any crime."
No crime. No warrant. Just your face in a crowd.
The "Checkpoint Britain" Warning
Big Brother Watch released a report called "Checkpoint Britain" examining the dangers of mandatory digital ID. Their analysis is blunt:
"At their worst, digital ID systems can enable population-wide surveillance; infringe on civil liberties; monitor, predict or influence individuals' decisions; and facilitate the tracking, persecution, or differential treatment of marginalised groups."
Their director, Silkie Carlo, told MPs: "A government-issued, mandatory digital ID has the potential to create an incredibly intrusive system of surveillance and data collection, and it opens up possibilities for the government to issue and revoke permissions in certain ways."
Issue and revoke permissions. Think about what that means. Your right to work. Your access to services. Your ability to travel. All tied to a single digital identity that the government controls.
Rebecca Vincent, Big Brother Watch's interim director, put it more directly: "The so-called 'BritCard' would fundamentally change everyone's relationship with the state, moving us towards a 'papers please' society and putting a burden on all law-abiding people to prove our right to be here."
Mission Creep Is Not Hypothetical
The Electronic Frontier Foundation identifies "mission creep" as a core concern. The government says digital ID will be for employment verification. But once the infrastructure exists, scope expansion becomes almost inevitable.
Big Brother Watch notes the government is already considering using digital ID for right-to-rent checks. The roadmap includes "voting online, signing contracts, paying bills and shopping." Each expansion seems reasonable in isolation. Combined, they create comprehensive surveillance of daily life.
And here's the thing about facial recognition at protests: it's the perfect example of mission creep in action. The technology was introduced for specific law enforcement purposes. Now it's being deployed at political demonstrations to scan crowds of people exercising their legal right to assemble.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned that using facial recognition at protests could have a "chilling effect" on people's rights under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Freedom of expression. Freedom of assembly. These rights are fundamental to democratic society.
A chilling effect isn't paranoia. It's people deciding not to attend protests because they know their face will be scanned, matched, and stored. It's self-censorship driven by surveillance.
Who Gets Hurt?
Surveillance doesn't affect everyone equally.
Data from the Met Police shows that Black men trigger alerts at higher rates than expected proportionally compared to London's population. Over half of the Met's facial recognition deployments in 2024 were in areas with higher-than-average Black populations.
At least three people have been falsely jailed after facial recognition misidentification. These aren't edge cases. They're predictable outcomes of deploying imperfect technology at scale.
The EFF points out that approximately only 20% of Universal Credit applicants can successfully use online ID verification. Homeless individuals, asylum seekers, domestic abuse survivors, those without reliable internet, people with disabilities affecting technology use. All face barriers.
Tom Sulston, Head of Policy at Digital Rights Watch Australia, explains the fundamental problem with biometric systems: "If you find yourself at the wrong end of a breach, you can't change your identity, you can't change your biometrics. If you are wrongly identified, you may never be able to correct that."
Your face isn't a password. You can't reset it after a breach.
The Protest Footage Problem
Here's something that deserves more attention: police can retain footage of protests for decades.
Think about what that means combined with improving facial recognition technology. A protest you attended in 2015 could be reanalysed with 2035 algorithms and matched against a 2029 digital ID database. Your historical exercise of democratic rights becomes permanently searchable.
This isn't theoretical. The Network for Police Monitoring has noted that "retrospective facial recognition technology could be used on thousands of photos" to identify individuals, map friendship and political groups, and track movements over time.
Every photo you took. Every photo someone else took of you. Every video. All of it potentially becomes evidence in a future we can't predict.
What Can You Actually Do?
I'm not going to pretend individual action solves systemic problems. The appropriate response to mass surveillance is political: demanding transparency, supporting civil liberties organisations, signing petitions (nearly 3 million people have signed the petition against mandatory digital ID), contacting your MP.
But alongside political action, there are practical steps to protect yourself and the people you photograph.
If You're Photographing Protests
You have a responsibility to the people in your images. Documenting history matters. So does protecting individuals from the systems that will use that documentation against them.
Blur all faces before sharing. Not just people you think might be at risk. Everyone. You don't know who has an abusive ex-partner searching for them. You don't know who might lose their job if identified at certain protests. You don't know what future government might use today's photos.
Strip all metadata. GPS coordinates can place someone at a specific protest. Timestamps reveal patterns. Device identifiers can link photos across platforms. Remove everything before you share.
Process offline. Don't upload protest photos to cloud services for editing. Don't trust random websites to strip metadata. Process everything on your device, where you maintain control.
ClearShare does all of this. Face detection and blur. Metadata removal. Everything on-device, nothing uploaded anywhere. Download it here.
If You're Attending Protests
Assume you're being photographed. By police. By journalists. By other attendees. By counter-protesters. By random people with phones. Act accordingly.
Consider your face. Masks, sunglasses, hats. Research suggests facial recognition algorithms emphasise the eye region, so partial coverings may not be fully effective against modern systems. But they're better than nothing.
Be aware of what you post. Social media posts place you at specific events at specific times. That's data. Even without facial recognition, it's evidence.
Think about your devices. Your phone contains location history, photos, messages, contacts. If it's seized, all of that is potentially accessible. Consider what you bring and what you leave behind.
If You're Sharing Protest Content
Get consent where possible. If you can identify specific individuals and contact them, ask if they're comfortable being in shared imagery.
Default to protection. When you can't get consent, default to protecting people's identities. Blur faces. Remove metadata. Share context without compromising individuals.
Consider the platform. Different platforms have different data retention policies, different relationships with law enforcement, different levels of security. Some strip metadata automatically. Some don't. Some have been compelled to hand over user data. Choose deliberately.
The Bigger Picture
I'm not going to tell you Britain is becoming a police state. That kind of hyperbole isn't helpful.
What I will say is this: the infrastructure for comprehensive population surveillance is being built. Some of it already exists. More is coming. And the gap between "capability" and "deployment" tends to close over time.
Facial recognition at protests is already deployed. Digital ID legislation is progressing. Police databases are expanding. Retention periods are long. And the technology keeps improving.
YouGov polling found that 63% of Britons don't trust the government to secure digital ID data. That's a significant majority expressing distrust in the basic competence of the system being proposed.
There's a reason nearly 3 million people signed a petition opposing mandatory digital ID. There's a reason Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said his party would fight the policy "tooth and nail". There's a reason Big Brother Watch called it "wholly unBritish."
This isn't a partisan issue. It's about what kind of relationship we want between citizens and the state. And it's about whether documenting political activity should carry the risk of permanent identification and surveillance.
Protect the People in Your Photos
Technology is neutral. Facial recognition can find missing children and identify criminals. It can also enable authoritarian surveillance and suppress political dissent. What matters is how it's deployed, who controls it, and what safeguards exist.
Right now, the safeguards are inadequate. The oversight is minimal. The legal framework is unclear. And the direction of travel is towards more surveillance, not less.
If you photograph protests, you're creating data that will exist long after the immediate moment. Data that could be analysed by systems that don't exist yet, under governments we can't predict.
The responsible thing is to protect the people in your images before you share them. Strip the metadata. Blur the faces. Document history without compromising individuals.
ClearShare makes this practical. All processing happens on your device. Your photos never leave your phone until you choose to share them. You see exactly what data exists, decide what to remove, and share safely.
Protesters' right to privacy is as fundamental as their right to protest. In a world of facial recognition databases and mandatory digital ID, protecting that privacy has never been more important.
Stay safe out there.
