A new Guardian investigation raises serious concerns about the Home Office's use of AI across immigration enforcement, including facial recognition, phone analysis and asylum casework.
According to Open Rights Group, much of this is happening with little public scrutiny, with national security repeatedly cited to withhold information.
Britain was so concerned about the security of Huawei equipment that it ordered its removal from our 5G networks. All the technology our own government is deploying deserves the same scrutiny.
Our recent history gives us plenty of reasons to question government assurances.
In 2020, the Home Office withdrew an algorithm used to assess visa applications following a legal challenge alleging discrimination.
The Post Office Horizon scandal demonstrated the devastating consequences of trusting flawed computer evidence while dismissing the people who challenged it. Hundreds were wrongly prosecuted, with lives, reputations and livelihoods destroyed.
Britain already has extensive CCTV surveillance, expanding facial recognition, growing digital identity systems and documented cases of people losing access to banking services.
AI now gives governments the ability to analyse and connect vast amounts of information about individuals on a scale that would previously have been unimaginable.
Companies such as Palantir are already deeply involved in British public services, supplying technology to the NHS and Ministry of Defence.
Their growing role raises more concerns about how much control does the government retain when essential public systems depend on technology developed and maintained by private companies?
These technologies are being introduced for reasons that often sound perfectly reasonable, including national security, fraud prevention and improving public services.
The danger is what happens when more of our identities, movements, finances and personal information become accessible through increasingly connected systems.
I suspect many politicians truly believe they're making people's lives better. What concerns me is whether they fully understand the technology they're commissioning, the influence of the companies supplying it and the power they're potentially handing over.
A society in which people can be monitored, assessed and potentially excluded from essential services through systems they cannot understand or challenge is a frightening prospect.
Decisions made today could have consequences for individual freedom that future governments struggle to reverse.
If the government uses systems to assess people while limiting what the public can see about how they work, how are ordinary people supposed to challenge them when they get things wrong?
Read the full article here:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/27/digital-hostile-environment-ai-secretly-embedded-home-office-report
