Volunteer techies are using facial recognition software to track down some of those involved in the riots.



An online group called ‘London Riots Facial Recognition’ has been set up to discuss methods of identifying those participating in the disruptions, including the use of the facial recognition already integrated into Facebook. Recent posts have suggested the construction of a tool that could recognise individuals from images uploaded to Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.



“I’m not sure that this type of home built solution would be that advantageous to the police as you would effectively need correctly tagged photos of particular people already,” Graham Cluely, technology consultant at online security firm Sophos, told Yahoo! News.



“What would disturb me is that if people started using software like this, coming to conclusions based upon home-brew facial recognition software, then took the law into their own hands,” he added. “If you are able to identify someone’s name it may not be very much effort to find their personal details- there begins a witch-hunt.”



The Met Police used its own Flickr account yesterday to upload images of people pictured during unrest in Croydon and West Norwood. The gallery had more than three million hits in five hours as the Met encouraged people to identify anyone they recognised from the CCTV images. The facial recognition group has asserted that they intend to ‘keep things legal’, stating that “it’s important we only use legal sources for images”.



“People should not take the law into their own hands but anybody with any information on those that have committed acts of criminality during the disorder should provide it to us,” a Met Police spokesman said. “Every piece of information that is received by any investigative team is assessed to see if it can assist the investigation.”



Social networking sites have been used to orchestrate clean-up efforts for areas affected by rioting within the last few days, but also came under scrutiny after looters planned attacks using Facebook. Facial recognition remains controversial, the German state is currently threatening Facebook with legal action over use of the technology, claiming it violates privacy and data protection laws.























