Well, would you look at that. There we were, in 2020, worrying about people who didn’t wear face masks; now here we are, in 2026, worrying about people who do wear face masks. As usual, there have been calls to do something! make a law! ban people like them! but not people like us! The police have also weighed into the debate, which isn’t always a good sign. But given the tense and anxious times we live in, a potential ban on masks may be one more thing, to add to all the other things, that we should be worrying about.

There’s a reason Scottish police officers are raising the subject now: live facial recognition technology or LTR, which compares live camera footage against a database of faces. It can be used to control entry to secure buildings, but some police forces in England and Wales are already using it to scan public spaces for suspects or missing persons or individuals with an arrest warrant, and Police Scotland is currently looking into whether they should be doing the same.

The obvious flaw with the cutting-edge, AI-powered tech is that non-AI actual human beings can just whack on a mask and the system’s screwed, and part of me loves that, because it demonstrates that AI is terribly clever and terribly stupid and humans can still defeat it. But the Scottish Police Federation has pointed out that there’s little point in investing millions of pounds in sophisticated technology capable of recognising a face if an individual can simply hide their face behind a mask.

The federation’s suggested solution raises some questions though. Its general secretary David Kennedy says that, in order to get round the problem of people hiding their faces from LTR, there might need to be “limited circumstances” in which the police could require people to remove face coverings. Something similar has already been introduced in England with the new Crime and Policing Act which allows the cops to establish 24-hour........

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