Facewatch is a private UK company offering facial recognition to retailers as a loss-prevention tool: shops maintain a shared watchlist of people flagged for theft or antisocial behaviour, and cameras at participating stores alert staff to a match. It sits outside the ordinary policing oversight structure, since it isn't run by a police force, but is included in the tracker because retailer watchlists have in some documented arrangements been shared with or informed by police-held information, which places it at the boundary between commercial and police surveillance rather than cleanly on one side of it.

The Information Commissioner's Office examined Facewatch's practices following complaints and found it could continue operating provided certain safeguards were in place, a materially different regulatory outcome from Clearview AI, whose web-scraped database the ICO and equivalent regulators elsewhere found to breach data protection law outright. The distinction the ICO drew was largely about consent and purpose: Facewatch's watchlist is built from images retailers already lawfully hold for security purposes, not scraped from the open web.