'I was misidentified as shoplifter by facial recognition tech'

Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store.

"Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'."

Sara - who wants to remain anonymous - was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch.

She says after her bag was searched she was led out of the shop, and told she was banned from all stores using the technology.

"I was just crying and crying the entire journey homeā€¦ I thought, 'Oh, will my life be the same? I'm going to be looked at as a shoplifter when I've never stolen'."

Facewatch later wrote to Sara and acknowledged it had made an error.

Facewatch is used in numerous stores in the UK - including Budgens, Sports Direct and Costcutter - to identify shoplifters.

The company declined to comment on Sara's case to the BBC, but did say its technology helped to prevent crime and protect frontline workers. Home Bargains, too, declined to comment.

It's not just retailers who are turning to the technology.

On a humid day in Bethnal Green, in east London, we joined the police as they positioned a modified white van on the high street.

Cameras attached to its roof captured thousands of images of people's faces.

If they matched people on a police watchlist, officers would speak to them and potentially arrest them.

Unflattering references to the technology liken the process to a supermarket checkout - where your face becomes a bar code.