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Churches are starting to use facial recognition technology to keep track of which members of the congregation are the most devoted - raising concerns from privacy campaigners.

Churchix is software designed to pick out people's faces from photos in order to monitor attendance or help to sort massive collections of photos from events.

It's built using the same technology used to identify criminals, problem gamblers and terrorists at airports.

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To introduce the system, religious organisations need to get members to submit passport-like images to a database and install cameras in their places of worship. Feeds taken from the CCTV are then compared to the pictures in the database to see who attends each week.

Churches are even encouraged to set up a 'checkpoint' where members voluntarily register themselves by looking at a camera - with 99% accuracy.

Installing Churchix lets churches measure things like the male-to-female ratio and the average age of attendees at different services.

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It's been developed by facial recognition specialist Face-Six, which has been operating in the high-end security market for several years.

The company says the system is already being used by more than 30 churches in the USA, Asia and Europe.

The company’s CEO Moshe Greenshpan told Churchm.ag that they never set out to sell the software to churches until requests started coming in.

“Within a short period of time we've been approached by 10 different churches from all over the world, all asking for the same thing – give us a face recognition software that can identify members attending our events,” he explained.

"This is a clear example of completely over-the-top use of technology. Churches have managed to note who is in their congregation for hundreds of years without resorting to highly intrusive means," says Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch.

“At a time when our privacy is constantly being intruded upon, with the average person in the UK being caught on CCTV hundreds of times a day, let’s hope that our places of worship remain environments where we can still expect a high level of privacy.”

Greenshpan argues that churches already track their members manually, so Churchix is just digitising the process.