The first major legal challenge in the UK over police use of facial recognition technology will begin in Cardiff today.
Ed Bridges, from Cardiff, has crowdfunded action against South Wales Police over claims that the use of the technology on him was an unlawful violation of privacy.
Mr Bridges is also expected to argue the surveillance method breaches data protection and equality laws during the three-day hearing at Cardiff Civil Justice and Family Centre.
The father-of-two claims to have been scanned by Automatic Facial Recognition (AFR) at least twice, including during a shopping trip in December 2017.
"I popped out of the office to do a bit of Christmas shopping and on the main pedestrian shopping street in Cardiff, there was a police van," he told BBC News.
"By the time I was close enough to see the words 'automatic facial recognition' on the van, I had already had my data captured by it.
"That struck me as quite a fundamental invasion of my privacy."
South Wales Police said it would not comment until the judicial review is finished.
Facial recognition technology maps faces in a crowd then compares results with a "watch list" of images which can include suspects, missing people and persons of interest.
Police who have trialled the technology argue it could help tackle crime but campaigners say it breaches privacy and civil liberty.
The civil rights group Liberty, which represents Mr Bridges, has described the current use of AFR as equivalent to the unregulated taking of DNA or fingerprints without consent.
South Wales Police first used facial recognition technology during the week of the 2017 Champions League final in Cardiff.
Liberty claims the force has used the tool “on around 50 occasions” since then.
Information about AFR on a website set up by South Wales Police says it will help the force "become smarter" and make its patch safer, adding that officers were working to "ensure that the deployment of this technology is proportionate whilst recognising the need to balance security and privacy".
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However, Freedom of information requests have revealed that South Wales Police's use of live AFR technology "resulted in 'true matches' with less than 9 per cent accuracy" in the first year, according to Liberty.
Three UK police forces have used facial recognition in public spaces since June 2015: South Wales Police, Metropolitan Police and Leicestershire Police.
It comes after San Francisco became the first US city to ban the use of facial recognition software by police and other city departments, labelling it “Big Brother technology.”
