Revised 15.8.18 Dear FOI, Thank you for your response to my request TfL Ref: 1054-1819 letting me know it may exceed the time and costs and asking me to refine the request. I would like to ask the same questions but would like TFL to search only information relevant to the request on any data you may hold pertaining to the last 24 months only. So the questions will now read: a) Please advise if TFL have had discussions with police, business partners or technology companies, etc, about facial recognition technology, either live (in real time) or static (not in real time) in the past 24 months. i) If so please advise with who and dates when discussed. ii) If not please advise if there are any plans to use facial recognition technology in the future. b) Please advise if any TFL cameras have utilised facial recognition technology, please specify whether live or static in the past 24 months. i) If so please advise dates when deployed. ii) Please advise if it was conjunction with another organisation and advise that organisation. iii) Please advise number of cameras used. iv) Please advise how the public was informed facial recognition was being deployed. c) Please advise if access has been granted to TFL property for another organisation to deployment facial recognition technology, live or static, with their own cameras, i.e. with cameras not owned by TFL in the past 24 months. i) If so please advise organisation and dates when this occurred. ii) Please advise number of cameras used. iii) Please advise how the public was informed facial recognition was being deployed. If the limits of time and cost of the Act may still be exceeded by the amended 'in the past 24 months' restriction please advise. We could then look at narrowing this to 'in the past 18 months' or other options. Thank you for your time on this.

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TfL Ref: 1054-1819 

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 16 July 2018 and for your clarification email of 15 August asking for information about Facial Recognition technology.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy.  

TfL does not currently use any facial recognition technology across our network.

Unfortunately, to provide the information you have requested would still exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information you have requested and the locating and retrieving of it and the extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described.

As this information could potentially be held across a wide variety of individuals and departments there is no central repository within which all of the requested information would be held. Therefore, in order to answer your request, we have conducted a company wide search of all TfL mailboxes over the past 24 months for any emails containing the keyword ‘facial recognition’. The search was stopped at approximately a tenth of the way through having reached 4,000 hits. In order to provide a response to your request, it would require us to manually review the results of the full search and then extract and collate those that are relevant. We consider that it would significantly exceed the cost limit to review what is likely to be in excess of 10,000 emails and extract those which are relevant to your request.

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking.  If you want to refine your request or make a Freedom of Information Act request in future, please bear in mind that the Freedom of Information Act allows you to request recorded information held by us. You should identify the information that you want as clearly and concisely as you can, specifying the types of document that you are looking for. You might also consider limiting your request to a particular period of time or specific departments of the organisation. Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, we do not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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