Sainsbury’s goes full-on Big Brother as it rolls out facial recognition

Sainsbury’s has started using facial recognition in two of its stores, apparently to “crack down on shoplifting.” But let’s call the new machines that have been installed in one store apiece in Bath and London exactly what they are: the eye of Big Brother. A Live Facial Recognition (LFR) camera bolted to the ceiling, staring down at some of the poorest people in London, waiting for me, or the ghost of who I was, to fuck up.

​I spent two and a half brutal years of my life homeless and stuck, struggling with trauma I didn’t know I had. My late teens and early twenties are a blur of addiction, self-destruction, and being totally and utterly lost. I was a thief, yes, I will admit it. But I only stole to survive and only from corporate giants. The disgusting irony of Sainsbury’s rolling out this dystopian surveillance technology to “combat crime” is a total slap in the face, given that they boasted a £1.6 billion profit last year.

Turning to surveillance cameras to address people stealing food criminalises a symptom and ignores a much larger problem: why are people going hungry in the first place? And, for that matter, what kind of absurd cruelty is it to then punish those people for needing to steal to eat?

Manufactured desperation from Sainsbury’s

Retail bosses often talk about a ‘spiralling crime epidemic.’ They throw out stats, reducing those struggling to nothing but a number, and use them to justify a dystopian surveillance state.

Shall we look at some of those stats?

The British Retail Consortium stated losses from theft reached £2.2 billion in 2023/24. That is a massive 22% increase from the previous year. Official police statistics are equally as stark – there were 516,971 shoplifting offences in England and Wales by year ending December 2024. That’s the highest figure in over twenty fucking years, when such statistics began to be recorded.

These numbers are screamed as an existential threat to retail, shocking figures thrown out to scare the public, and leave them cheering for these cameras. But where is the outrage? This massive explosion of theft is a result of our crumbling society; surely people can see that? Why are people so content to give away their freedoms so easily? This explosion of theft mirrors the destruction of the social safety net, driven by well over a decade of brutal austerity and the cost-of-living crisis.

Economic violence

In the years I was forced to steal from these corporate giants, I stole to eat and drown my sorrows. One grim-looking security firm claims that, based on their experience, packaged meat, baby formula, and alcohol are the most popular items shoplifted. It’s hardly the work of master criminals. Back then, I wasn’t a criminal; I was a desperately lost girl whose basic human needs had been made illegal.

If a society strips away services, cuts benefits, and artificially inflates the price of food, you cannot act surprised when the most vulnerable turn to desperate measures to survive. If the establishment legislates poverty, this is not governance. Actually, it is economic violence used to justify technological suppression. The state itself admits that 70% of retail thefts are carried out by frequent hard drug users, proving that addiction is a disease, homelessness is a desperate crisis, and shoplifting is a direct result of this.

This isn’t a crime wave. This is a wave of hunger and trauma, crashing against the doors of the wealthy elite.

The war on families

The CEO of Sainsbury’s, Simon Roberts, says trialling the LFR is essential because colleagues are concerned about “rising abuse” and must “put safety first.”

But who are the real victims here?

Last year, Sainsbury’s Retail Underlying Operating Profit was over £1 billion, up a massive 7.2% on the previous year, and what was CEO Simon Roberts’ compensation for this? A ridiculous £5.19 million.

If Sainsbury’s has the money to pay one man over £5 million, don’t they have the capability to help poor people? They are spending a wild amount of money on facial recognition technology, as good capitalist bastions of the surveillance state. Simultaneously, that same state is starving social services, housing support, and addiction centres… the things that would actually solve the problem.

They’re choosing to build walls, not bridges.

This manufactured crime wave is worsened by policies that specifically target families. We all know about the two-child benefit cap, a cruel political choice that means struggling families miss out on about £3,455 per year. This disproportionately affects single-parent households, with approximately 71% of benefit-capped families being lone parents, half of whom have a child under five.

Coupled with horrifically stagnating wages, inflation consistently outstripping pay growth, Sainsbury’s is effectively installing biometric software tools not to catch “organised gangs” but to catch struggling single mothers who need to feed their babies.

Corporate bias and the police state

Corporate integration of LFR into retail isn’t a minor security upgrade. It is an unethical and terrifying sprint towards a corporate police state.

By entering that Sainsbury’s store, every single shopper is now subject to a real-time biometric check. This is the privatisation of social control. This technology violates our fundamental right to privacy by turning a simple top-up shop into a mandatory, uncensored biometric scan.

LFR is far more insidious than regular CCTV. It will remember your face and scan your every move. Its very presence can have a chilling effect on everyday life, creating a cloud of fear in which people are scared to exist in their own communities.

The increased danger comes with this technology’s flaws. The facial recognition algorithms are prone to racial and gender bias. LRF performs a lot worse when identifying people of colour and women, and that should scare all of you. This means that the people who are most affected by austerity, such as the working poor, single mothers, those suffering with addiction, and minoritised communities, are the most likely to be misidentified, flagged, and excluded by untrained security staff.

The unaccountable police state

It weaponises technology to further existing institutional discrimination. Back in the day, if that LFR camera had caught me, the consequences would have been so damaging. It would have been a short prison sentence, ripping away the tenuous grip I had on recovery. For those of us who have walked the dark and lonely path of addiction and homelessness, this would do nothing but continue the spiral into despair. The only thing that would work is empathy, secure housing, and accessible treatment.

When Sainsbury’s, our own police, and the government align on initiatives like this, they are creating a private surveillance infrastructure that can be quickly integrated into public policing.

This isn’t a sudden, military takeover; this is a slow, maddening descent into a surveillance police state that will affect all aspects of our daily lives.

By allowing LFR, these supermarkets are acting as an unaccountable, pre-emptive policing arm of the establishment. This will enable corporations, driven by profit, to dole out their own form of exclusion. And this is entirely without the democratic safeguards of our court system.

Sainsbury’s: corporate leeches

Sainsbury’s and the other corporate leeches have chosen to criminalise our most vulnerable. They have chosen not to invest in life, but to invest in a police state. This slow descent into a Big Brother state is accelerating rapidly, and we should be terrified of it.

Facial recognition is not a solution to crime; it is a politicised statement which draws a final, unforgiving line in the sand drawn by unregulated capitalist dogs, and it screams:

We know you’re poor, we deliberately made you this way, and now we are going to watch your every move to make sure you never take back anything we stole from you.

We need to stand up to this.

We need to stand up for every mother who needs to feed her newborn child milk.

For every homeless teenager who hasn’t eaten in days and wants nothing but to find a safe place to sleep.

For the lost addict, drowning their sorrows in narcotics when all they need is stability and someone to help them.

Enough is enough.

Featured image via Unsplash/Nick Loggie