> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available and images of anyone not on the authorised database will be deleted immediately and permanently.
So, massive invasion of privacy, but will only catch stupid criminals (and unsuspecting people who happen to have a strong resemblance with a criminal in the database?).
It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers.
I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time.
I don’t want people being surprised as though THIS is the nail in the coffin of untracked movement across the city. As others have said, we’ve always been tracked. This is just them being open about their latest methods.
I hope this serves as a warning for citizens elsewhere: this is a slope that governments will only slide down further. There is no coming back from this in the UK.
Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.
Any weapons can and will be utilised against a perceived enemy. When that perceived enemy becomes /you/, you should expect these things to be used against you.
History has taught us that before.
We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.
To add: same happened in russia around 2018 on a couple of subway stations in St.-Pete and in moscow at first
the result? faster tracking and arrests of people for checks who were deemed too problematic + (i.e. with anti-war protests in 2022) the cameras were used to track or threat tracking almost everyone who protested, and lowering the load on the police by coming to the dwellings afterwards in the next several days or even weeks without the need to do it there and then
in 2018-2021 it was still possible to overwhelm the holding capacity of jails in major cities, but after mass tracking it more or less became obsolete
Reminds me of a story I read long ago. (And Snowden's point that even if the current government uses such powers responsibly, a future government may not be so kind...)
---
R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?
D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.
If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.
R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...
D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.
R.E: Could I get some food?
D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,
"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"
Oyster is still anonymous, in the sense that no details are required to buy a card, and it can be topped up using cash. The cards can be returned or disposed of as necessary. But as you say, it knows your movements at least in so far as your entry and exit point in the system, with a timestamp, though you can use a separate card for each if you don't mind paying the full fare that gets charged when a journey is 'incomplete'. The barriers also still currently accept paper tickets, but for how long will be anyone's guess. I would assume that as Travelcards can be tied to paper National Rail tickets, it will still be some time until that goes away. I see a lot more people using eTickets these days, and trains even have adverts now reminding people to keep their phones charged to be able to show their ticket to inspectors.
I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.
As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been finessed into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.
Self-checkout at the grocery store is a major vector for shoplifting. That's why the cameras are there.
If I was running such a store, I wouldn't want to spend the money on those cameras. But alas, the money is well spent in stopping thieves.
I was talking to one of the staff in a grocery store a while ago. He said the corporate auditors came in one day and decided to review the security cams. The result was half the staff was fired for theft.
It's just too bad that we live in a low trust society.
I know this is the standard response, but it doesn't make sense. If you're going to steal something, why would you expose it at the checkout? Wouldn't you just not bring it out at that point? It's the same for the really annoying scales that some supermarkets insist on that weigh every item you as you pack it, which makes packing really hard.
The whole thing feels like post hoc justification for bad design (or bad understanding of the usage).
But the cameras on the UK self-checkouts only point at your face. How does that stop anything other than casual opportunistic theft of low value items by inculcating some kind of pre-crime guilt feeling? Professional shoplifters (if that isn't an oxymoron) have much more subtle means to carry out their trade, or not as the case may be, depending on their target, usually carried out long before they reach any kind of till.
The cameras here are in the ceiling, and they watch to see if you are scanning the merchandise before putting it in the bag. I presume they are AI-trained to catch this.
I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.
There are almost certainly more cameras to catch the stealing on tape too. But when the camera or even a person sees you swipe something, they are gonna want to have a pic of your face to be able to know who you are, especially so they can recognize repeat offenders. Next time you show up, they might be looking for their most notorious thieves so they can call police, point to you and hand them a video of the last time you stole.
I highly doubt that story as camera footage is audited remotely (the store staff know nothing about it), and half the staff is way too high (to not be detected on the ground).
Not all machines lead to increase in the standard of living, and many things that would improve the standard of living are not done. At some point the argument you have made becomes irrelevant and cliched.
The savings that a store has from self checkouts far outweigh the shoplifting it attracts. I don’t see what the cameras add. Do stores review camera footage at the end of the day and then hunt down the offenders?
They can catch legitimate mistakes. I had this happen about a week ago. I scanned something, thought I heard the beep, then put it in the bag. It stopped me and replayed the video. I looked at the item list and sure enough, it didn't scan. It was an honest mistake, and the camera caught it. I rescanned it after the attendant cleared the error.
I've also had it flag when it thinks there is more stuff in my cart when going to pay. This happened to me when I had an umbrella in my cart. The attendant had to come over and clear it. When I worked at a grocery store 20+ years ago, checking that there was nothing on the bottom of the cart was a big thing for cashiers; the cameras seem to automate this check at self-checkout.
I've also had if false flag when I pass my hand over in a way that looks questionable, where the attendant has to come review the video and clear it.
All this stuff happens in real-time during the checkout process.
For people who want to steal, they seem to find ways around it. I was at the store a couple months ago (the same one that has all the tech mentioned above) and the beep next to me sounded ever so slightly off. I looked over, the guy was on the payment screen, which I'm assuming disables a lot of the camera checks, and was passing all his items over the scanner and making the beep noise with his mouth. The tone wasn't perfect, but it was really close.
Primarily used to catch and ban from the shop heavy repeat offenders, some people shop lift on order and resell items versus use them for them selves, or have addiction problems with alcoholism etc.
They just dirty the airwaves with whatever lies they want to justify spying. Drag them to court where they have to be honest and well, their BS is revealed.
The low trust side is entirely on the rich owners class side of the divide.
Academics and credentialed class take some blame here too; of course no one is going to be capable of a task or job without their coursework. Nevermind expertise in $thing been around since before their class
Capitalism has turned everyone into a fucking Udemy sales pitch.
Only 30% of people have seen a mental health professional since 2020. Everyone else does what we used to do; rather than pay a modern day preacher for faith healing[1] we have friends.
Maybe not organised like the mafia but you 100% get crackheads shoplifting in an organised fashion to get money for drugs in London, and self checkouts obviously make this easier.
Not unheard of to get crackheads trying to sell you stolen supermarket meat out of a bag if you hang around in some of the less salubrious pubs
there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...
Yes, but as I said it is possible to use a separate ID for entry and exit, so unless they were willing to perform a CCTV trawl then your entire journey could not be assessed. The penalty for this kind of anonymity is paying top fare for entry and exit, so only a very rich tube user could bear the cost. The thing that got people to use Oyster in the first place was 'discounted' prices, as in they bumped the price for a paper ticket when Oyster cards were introduced and kept the old prices for Oyster only journeys. Make of that what you will. Paper tickets are still available as of 2026 last time I checked.
There was a similar data trawl when Boris bikes were introduced, and some of the information gleaned from that was quite hilarious but I can't find a link because it was from the old world and now lost in enshitted search.
I think the point with those supermarket cameras is to influence behaviour, not to surveil, I doubt they are even recording. When I was a kid (maybe in a worse area than you) there were CRT TVs by entrances of supermarkets showing a live feed of you walking in. People behave differently when they feel they are being watched, it's why they have creepy CCTV posters with big eyes on them. Probably the same reason for evil eye charms too.
Yes, this has been under consideration when thinking just how much raw footage would have to be stored for 4 or more self-checkout cameras for every shop. Probably multiple terabytes per day, per chain, just for London. There is also the classic 'plastic camera with blinking LED' CCTV installation, intended to deter theft in a more lo-fi manner.
As an aside, the artist John Baldessari made an installation in the Tate Modern where you were filmed walking into a room and the image was projected on the wall, but with about a 10 second delay, so that the feedback loop between seeing yourself 'on screen' and being able to influence it was completely broken. It was quite interesting to experience.
About 8 or 9 years ago I saw a self checkout pos provider demo a camera/screen system that would do basic images processing constantly to try and take pictures when people are clearly visible. A couple of low res, low colour palette, cropped images per user are much much easier to store. This was at a security conference.
Fair enough, sounds like a reasonable compromise, but I still question the entire premise of having these cameras in the first place, especially since they do not film the area where items are being handled. Tallying a loss of stock to a specific person would seem to be really quite difficult to do with only a set of photographs of the faces of everyone who utilised the self-checkouts within a certain period.
You only need 3-5 fps SD video and with motion sensing you only record when there is a customer at the self-checkout. Technically, it is absolutely doable.
Primary theft at them is where you scan N cheap items and just bag Y expensive item without scan and walk out, plausible deniability/psychology at play, a lot less deniability if you shove a whisky bottle down your trousers.
And the thing that absolutely fucks me off about all of this, is that we don't even get a lawful society in exchange for all of this. On one hand, there's no privacy anywhere. On the other - have your car stolen or a bike? House broken into? Phone snatched out of your hands? Good luck getting anyone to care about this in the slightest. You'd think with all the surveillance tech we'd be living in a nightmare panopticon, but at least petty crime should be eliminated, but nope, sometimes I wonder what's the point of being a law abiding citizen if just stealing has zero consequences and just seems not prosecuted at all.
Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.
And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????
There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.
It's strange to me that in your bubble you think the police in the UK are mainly there to hassle the "Palestine" protestors and interrupt their peaceful "From the river to the sea" chants.
I would say it's a lot more serious that they did nothing to stop the organized Pakistani child-rape gangs, out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it.
Either way I can agree with you that it doesn't seem like the police in the UK are using their great power to do much good.
I think it's even worse than that. If at some remote possibility that a criminal does get caught and charged with a crime, the prisons are full (37% foreign criminals [0]) so they won't do any prison time, and therefore no justice is served. In fact our prisons are so full, violent criminals are being let out after serving only their half term [1].
> violent criminals are being let out after serving only their half term
G20 country prison systems that I'm aware of have early release programs, it's almost a requirement to optimise what space there is for those that most deserve prison.
What's at issue with [1] is where, in actual fact, do a couple of teenagers who nicked a quad bike and likely very unintentionally also'd a manslaughter fall on the "violent criminal" spectrum.
It's isolated and out of context, at the very least it needs an indication of the proportion of foreign born people in London, a major city with a large international population.
At one extreme, if the population of London happened to be almost entirely foreign born then it would seem that UK citizens are working overtime at London crime.
It's called anarchy-tyranny, where the government fails to enforce basic laws and keep people safe from real criminals (anarchy), but instead uses its power to tightly control, tax, and punish ordinary, law-abiding citizens (tyranny). There are various conspiratorial theories for why this happens but I think the simplest explanation is that an ineffective government cannot deal with criminals and goes after the easier and more compliant targets instead.
No, man, anecdotes are more often than not pure misinformation. You live in a country where car theft has absolutely plummeted in the last 30 years. Look it up, I guarantee it. 100 %. I'm almost certain it's the same for bike theft too.
You can probably thank Thatcher and the cabal of idiots dumber than lettuce that is the Tory party. Squeeze the poor, squeeze the state budget that even the police force is under-resourced, give the money to their buddies.
Norway is rich and socialist. I was there a while ago and their billboards had ads from their national refugee council asking for donations... on the Friday evening there was a march for Palestine in downtown Oslo. Imagine how well that would go down in the UK "society".
I don’t have evidence that shows specific examples of where it happens, but the state apparatus for it to do so exists. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that it is happening on a daily basis.
That does not at all suggest that UK ISPs proactively share anything with the state.
What it means is the GDPR doesn't stop ISPs choosing to share when asked, rather than waiting for the warranted request that will come, as long as there is a lawful basis.
Again: I don't really have a problem with that. If you've ever used a website that arranges work for lone workers (freelancers who do site visits, freelance estate agents, models, dog walkers) then you'll presumably want the people who run those communities to feel able to choose to share with law enforcement when asked.
I think your understanding of 'proactively' might just be different from parent's (and mine).
I'd agree that entities that provide their users' data upon a simple request, and a carveout in regulations that allows (not forces) them to do so, fits the definition of proactive.
Let's not get all Humpty Dumpty here. "Upon request" is reactive by definition. "Proactive" sharing would quite literally mean sharing on one's own initiative.
It's proactive in the sense that it's shared before a valid warrant is issued for the information, and before they have any reason to do so. But is reactive to any request at all, sure.
The issue with all this surveillance is that it always ends up with suppression of dissent and silencing of opposition by abusing enforcement agencies.
All such surveillance should start with 24-hour live video feed of private lives of all politicians... they carry immense power and control, and thus, warrant an equally powerful monitoring and scrutiny compared to common people.
It will be fine. Most Brits are comfortable with the poor quality of Orwell commentary from over the pond. American Orwell fans mostly don't even read his key novels like Keep the Aspadistra Flying, just his juvenile science fiction stuff.
In an interview with Ron Martinetti of American Legends website, Laura Huxley called Island "the finest and final work." In Laura's opinion, "He put everything in that. Brave New World was a warning and Island was an offering."
I'm a huge fan of Eric Blair's writing. Looking at the bookshelf now: "Down and out in Paris and London" is what I've reread the most (I've got two copies, one ready for gifting).
Demoting Orwell's masterpieces (1984 and Animal Farm) to "juvenile science fiction stuff" while holding up Keep the Aspidistra Flying—a mid-tier social realism novel about a middle-class poet struggling with commercialism—is top-tier British condescension (extra points for misspelling Aspidistra while doing so).
How else can you keep ahead of the bots and their em-dashes other than by the use of pointless condescension and subtle misspellings? I mean, you've got to find a niche somehow.
To be fair, while I enjoyed the fun language shenanigans and propaganda and political commentary of 1984, the actual plot was pretty bad imho. Then again one way of reading it is the protagonist is actually paranoid and is exaggerating everything, which isn't entirely a dig against Orwell. He was just aheaf of the curve with self insert fan fiction.
I think my favorite part of the book was when it just turned into reading the political thesis on the essence of oligarichal collectivism or whatever it is. It's a great cynical parody of modern society, but I still think everyone misses the point is that it isn't so much about surveillance as it's about power through language.
You could just as easily have the book set in 1884 without any of the "future tech" and have basically the same plot going around with busybodies and peeping toms filling the rolls of the telescreens.
The surveillance of China without the prosperity or safety. At least in China I can leave my bag or laptop out of sight for a moment, same cannot be said of my home city of London. What good is all of this when hard criminals are let out of prison after 6 months. Clown country.
The hubris for surveillance in UK is staggering, what will they do next - roll out the social score system so you'll be banned from taking the tube if you express too much non sanctioned thoughts online?
I'm waiting for them to turn every wifi router in 3D tracking nodes that monitor the exact location and body position of everyone nearby in buildings. Its too juicy of target once they get the tech fully figured out.
I really don't understand why they do trials for this. What would be the failure case for the trial? "We carried out the trial for 6 weeks over X period of time, we arrested Y people, at that rate we've decided this is not compatible with modern liberal democracy, we would've traded a free society for Y+2 arrests over X period but we just didn't quite get there"?
As suggested by other people - this is just going to be used to identify, infiltrate and disrupt the numerous peaceful protests that the police aren't keen on in London.
It's to get people used to the idea without giving enough surface area to fight it socially. Same thing happened with the body scanners at airports in the US, now with facial recognition at airports, and a number of other privacy concerns. It's a well-worn and proven playbook.
At first it's a trial, experimental. Then it's standard, but optional and with incentives to do it. Then it's standard but you can opt out and there's lots of signs to tell you how. Slowly they make it more uncomfortable to opt out, and the signs disappear, and they berate you for trying it. Eventually it is no longer legal to opt out.
Any one step is hard to fight back against without looking like a loon to people who don't care about this kind of thing, and over the course of a few years you can take people gently through a process that, had it happened suddenly, would never have succeeded due to pushback.
If I were to guess, they may have some "test" users (people who are involved in this) who are on the watchlist, they do their regular commutes and see if the system picks them up each time.
For this system there is no requirement that criminals faces are used to test it.
All due respect but I am not totally against police dealing with protests. I am against this Orwellian surveillance stuff. If you want to police so people can deal with day to day things like go shopping without being harassed or freaked out I am all for that. But do it the old fashioned way.
Just a guess, but I would think that a significant motivation for doing a trial is to ensure that the frog is boiled slowly.
Opposition can now be met with "it's just a trial, relax". Then you expand the trial a bit. Keep running it until the discourse moves on. And then a few years down the line, when you roll out the full system and people complain, you can counter with "these people are exaggerating their concerns, we've trialled this for yeaaars and there were very few problems!"
The obvious next step is to prevent entry if the face is covered. I'm curious to know how resistant the system is to face masks with a printed picture on the front (or indeed, the back).
Is it to ID protestors, or to ID overstayers/other immigrant offenses? Home Office just parked up outside the station waiting for every overstayer to flag instead of just questioning people on walkups?
The failure mode is incorrect detections. If the automated system says person 1 from camera 1 is the same as person 1 in camera 2, and then extrapolate out to 10,000 people and cameras, and then don't get it wrong. Because the BBC is never going to let you live it down if the person they arrested for stealing kinda sorta looks like the guy that actually did the stealing.
Jean Charles de Menezes never got as far as being arrested. The police observed him enter an Underground station, followed him onto a tube train, and put seven bullets into his head.
Or perhaps facial recognition would leave even less time for decision making.
Someone who's face resembles that of a known terrorist was detected entering the station 8 seconds ago. He's carrying a backpack and will be on a crowded platform in 37 seconds time. There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now...
There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now...
Is the suspect black?
(I'm asking this because there is evidence suggesting current facial recognition technology is less accurate at matching faces from some demographics, including black people. Why, what did you think I meant?)
Walk up and place him under arrest. He might have a bomb. He might have a trigger for it, or he might have a dead-man's switch. It might detonate and kill you along with bystanders. That's a risk you take.
Unless you know with certainty that he has a bomb and does not have a dead man's switch, you don't just take his life because you're concerned about what-ifs.
It's no different than cops killing a man because he was holding a wallet, which they imagined might be a gun (e.g. Amadou Diallo).
Police need to stop pretending that they exist within fiction, where the outcome is known by the author. Just because you're afraid of something doesn't mean it's an actual threat.
Since 2001, there's been a real uptick in confusing fear and suspicion for evidence and knowledge.
As an illustration of this, 100% of the detections in the trial in 2026 have been false positives. Scanning tens of thousands of faces for each deployment, they’ve had exactly one detection, which was false:
These are different problems, with different sensitivity/selectivity (and fail modes)
It's one thing to identify a person from a database, another from camera 1, then camera 2 etc. My guess is the latter has a much lower false positive rate
How would that work? Easiest way to stop protests is to block off the area of the planned protest and arrest people who try to enter it. It’s not clear to me how facial recognition on the tube would help from a practical point or view.
Also, this seems to just be a trial expanding existing time and location scoped deployments of live facial recognition into a new environment, rather than a trial run for always-on live facial recognition across the tube network.
Identify attendees and key figures from social media → pick them up when detected on public transport.
The real issue is not (just) this specific use case, rather it's the govt generally knowing where people are going and where they have historically been.
I don’t have a problem with protests, but clearly there’s no one set of laws or policies that will be agreeable to everyone. Think fox hunting, abortion, trans rights, etc. etc. There will always be protests in a representative democracy.
Facial recognition could be used to identify people who are likely to participate in protests and prevent them from doing so in advance by intercepting them at their boarding station or somewhere near it. You could also scan for persons arriving in a city where a protest might be plannend and arrest them beforehand.
As with your sibling comment, what you’re describing is theoretically possible, but it’s also more difficult and resource intensive than the simple dumb alternative of blocking off the area of the planned protest and putting some police officers outside nearby tube stations to arrest anyone who’s clearly intending to head to the protest.
It’s already easy for the police to prevent protests in a practical sense. It’s a political and legal issue more than a technical one.
What would be grounds for arresting someone at the tube stations? Is it illegal in the UK for police to believe you intend to go a certain area based on how you exit the tube?
Same grounds as for arresting them anywhere else, more or less. I am not saying that the police should ban protests (and they generally don’t). I’m just talking about the practicalities of how they could go about doing it.
It's not about grounds to arrest them, it's about practicality.
If you need to arrest someone in London (someone who might be about to cause harm) then there's a very good chance they will go through a tube station, and they tend to have relatively few, easily controlled exits. Most tube stations have two or less.
A few high profile tube stations occasionally have armed police presence.
But I think the idea that face recognition is being used to suppress protest is pretty overcooked; apart from the utter silliness around the banning of Palestine Action, we have a solid right to protest and we do.
The main problem is London has far too few police officers, and it has a transport system that is under consistent terror threat.
What do you mean by "need to arrest someone"? Would that be for someone who already committed a crime and has a warrant, or one who cops think may commit a crime in the future?
We’re talking about the practicalities of arresting protestors and whether or not face recognition on the tube would be a practical aid to police officers for this sort of purpose. Who should or shouldn’t be arrested is a separate question (and no-one here is suggesting that peaceful protestors should be arrested).
The latter is legitimate, isn't it? Do we not anticipate trying to arrest people who might be in the process of committing a terror attack, on the balance of evidence about their conduct? Or are we just going to wait?
Not to say that hasn't gone wrong (infamously and tragically, although that was largely a failure of conventional surveillance) but one key part of mass surveillance policing is arresting people who are clearly about to do a thing.
That might indeed be disruptive protest where it is illegal — for example if you know someone is intending to deface a painting or a monument, or has been planning to attend a protest to disrupt it.
I think people look at face detection policing in this context and imagine thoughtcrime, when the reality is e.g. finding a disturbed person who has been doing a dry run on pushing a stranger off a tube train platform (a real problem that seems to happen every couple of years), catching someone who has been reported sexually assaulting fellow passengers or who has violently assaulted another passenger or someone above ground (a regular problem), trying to disrupt county-lines drug distribution etc. (absolutely constant), or, heaven help us, finding someone who has been spotted at a national railway station with someone on terror watchlists who has then disappeared into the underground.
London Underground isn't a thing that can be effectively managed with ordinary policing. It has 272 stations, over 70 in central London alone. During rush hour there are up to half a million people in that system at any one time. Tube exits are choke points.
We're not talking about some notion of thoughtcrime here.
We're talking about preparation, and the equivalent of reasonable suspicion for a stop or probable cause for an arrest in the USA, where people absolutely are arrested every day for things an officer has seen enough evidence to believe are about to happen.
Whenever someone suggests it's OK for the police to arrest people for future crime they haven't committed I feel the need to point out that the police do not always act in the public interest. Individuals abuse their powers.
e.g. when they do things like holding illegal employment blacklist[1][2][3] of innocent people.
I don't want to live in a country where, for example, the police can punish you just because they don't like trade unions.
What's I find ironic is that all this police state bullshit never seems to actually deal with antisocial behaviour or low level crime, it's always for political infractions.
We have more CCTV in London than almost anywhere else on the planet and you still get harassed outside tube stations by organised gangs of soliciting very forcefully for "charity" collections.
I don't know English law, and I'm american so I have a bent towards protecting freedoms. That said, no I don't see it as necessary to arrest someone before they do anything wrong.
There's a gray area for sure, and in the US you can, for example, be charged with conspiracy to commit murder without actually getting to that end goal. I'm always uncomfortable with how a court decides to allow a trial in such a case, though if someone has actively been surveiling their target, collecting materials or weapons, and ideally documenting their intentions somehow then I do understand why most would consider that itself punishable.
If a person without a warrant gets off the tube and walks in a general direction of a protest, I wouldn't see any grounds for arrest. I'm sure there's still gray area there, say they're carrying smoke grenades or flash bangs or something - though in that case I'd assume the potential crime is possessing those items rather than walking in a direction.
> If a person without a warrant gets off the tube and walks in a general direction of a protest, I wouldn't see any grounds for arrest.
The police don't manage mass protests this way either. If they want to stop you joining a disruptive protest they just cordon off streets, close tube exits, stand in the way and tell you to turn back.
But severely disruptive micro-protests are now a significant problem in London; I am quite relaxed about the idea that someone known to be planning to seriously disrupt might get tracked to their destination, and I suspect so are they, or they aren't very serious about it.
I think people from the USA really misunderstand how policing works here. When we say we are "policed by consent" it is taken pretty seriously.
Back when I was a student, this idea of facial recognition was only a glimmer of possibility and the idea of all of this would have got my freedom fighter hackles up.
But if you've ever been in a tube station, one of the deep lines, when they've had to close exits and you're one of thousands of people who need to get out, you realise that these are high-pressure environments where even British reserve and fairness begin to fray. They are very vulnerable places. So I look at this plan and I am like… nope, doesn't bother me. Getting in and getting out at rush hour bothers me.
I am not without my concerns about the mobile recognition vans; I think there is a risk that they have a chilling effect on gatherings that is disproportionate. I dislike that concept in much the same way that I dislike our regional police force's tendency to get the helicopter out when a bit more road policing might do the job.
But inside the tube? Nope, facial recognition seems like a pretty worthwhile tool, not least because it could be so efficiently deployed.
They are prepared to arrest 90 year old protestors at Palestinian matches for Israel, they won't stop until all critism of that illegal state is silenced.
It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.
If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.
Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.
The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.
This. It's all within a democratic and legal framework, from GDPR to organisational policies. The source is the police themselves informing the public of the trial. The actual camera setup is bright yellow in the middle of the concourse, it's not hidden. They haven't hidden this technology, a private company hasn't deployed this technology. As citizens you have some control. It's probably not perfect, but there's humans in the loop. You have recourse to complain, to write to your PM, to take a different route (because they are pre-warning you). This IS democracy.
In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination. It is also the place where you can be jailed for not providing the PIN to your phone. I could go on.
How does that make us not a democracy? You are confusing the constitutionally based US system with the parliamentary based UK system. They work differently. We have elections typically every 4-5 years and elect a new government. That's the democracy bit. The laws that our elected representatives make are sometimes good, and sometimes bad. But they are made by the people we elected.
My point is that the technology exists, for good or ill, and we cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
What we can do, and should do as a society, is decide on how that technology should be used. And that means regulating it, in the same way that we regulate other technologies. For example, we regulate cars. Not just who can use them, but how they have to be constructed too. And we also place limits on how the authorities can use them, for example the rules that the police must obey when in an emergency response situation.
We are a democracy, so these rules are made by the people we have elected. so when it comes down to it, yes, this is what we as a people have asked for. And we are responsible for the conditions that the police can use this technology under.
FWIW, the capabilities and resources that the police have to track us 24/7 are an order of magnitude less than Google or Meta has. And they are an awful lot less accountable.
I mean, quite a lot of people want that or think they want it in many Western societies. They want the police to be able to find criminals, they want their kids kept off social media, they want terrorists' comms to be intercepted, they want 'immigrants' to not be able to claim benefits, they want voters to be required to produce ID, they want all manner of joined-up information state capabilities and they don't give a shit if they're surveilled and caught up in it until/unless it bites them in the ass.
And the thing is that they're not necessarily wrong to want some of those things, but they don't understand or don't care about collateral damage or what you might perceive as a lack of freedom. So they will happily vote for it.
Democracies vote to shoot themselves in the foot all the time. Look around you.
> In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination.
By "may harm your defence" what is meant is that Miranda was modified to inform people who are arrested that magistrates and juries are fully allowed to infer that you might be seeking to mislead the court if you didn't tell the police something significant that you later rely on as a defence in court. You're still allowed to do it, and they are allowed to conclude it is sketchy. That's the point of the modification.
Juries do and did this anyway.
The modified Miranda doesn't say you have no right against self-incrimination; it now warns you that if something is crucial to your defence it might be in your interest to mention it so the jury doesn't think you are trying to shine them on.
It's important to understand that this happens in the context of a country that does not have a plea bargaining mechanism. Cases go to court if it is in the public interest that they do (and the police don't decide this). But you can still no-comment your way through an interview and you aren't going to be bullied by a prosecutor into accepting a plea deal.
Of course but that is not really what I am asserting; I was just responding to an American in terms that are understood.
UK suspects on arrest are, nevertheless, read their rights in what is colloquially understood here as a "Miranda warning". It's my understanding that "Miranda rights" are a sort of colloquial shorthand in lots of countries, because we all see US crime procedurals.
(It's actually called "The Caution", and US Miranda rights were inspired by an earlier version, though AFAIR we borrowed back some changes that were influenced by the Miranda wording, before the contentious modification about "may harm your defence")
The subsequent "they modified Miranda" fuss made quite a bit of international news when it was introduced, with Americans sniping at us about changing it, arguing we'd taken away the right not to self-incriminate, etc., that we'd sullied the grand tradition of English Common Law, all that rather ironic snarking from the country that pioneered the abusive plea bargain system.
The Caution read at arrest is actually shorter in the UK; it doesn't mention that the cautioned have a right to an attorney or one will be appointed for them. They do, but the duty sergeant at the police station tells them that when they are booked.
You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
The only realistic protection here is a “decoy” partition, a partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS. That gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.
> You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
Again, no, not just "in an investigation".
It has to be an investigation that has reached the point where they have gone to a judge and got permission to serve written notice. The judge will ask them if there is a necessary and proportionate reason. There is then a timeframe in which you have to respond.
Police can't simply demand your PIN and charge you if you don't comply.
This just isn't true... you've heard of "no comment" right? And the ability for the police to invoke the requirement for you to provide your PIN is behind the tests of specific legislation. You're not automatically required to provide it.
i'm pretty sure the majority learned plenty well. But that's not whose in charge is it. Even in democracy, especially in America, it's the billionaires and puritans making these choices.
They are likely referring to religious fundamentalists, mostly evangelical Christians. Puritans is a reference to an older christian fundamentalist group in the US that now have a connotation as extreme in their views.
This is the country that can´t stop dingy boats...this despite journalists always being able to be there on time to take pictures for the Daily Mail...
Bad news, budget cuts mean we can afford a flounder with a paper fan. His name's Steven and he lives about twenty yards east of Lulworth Cover, but we reckon he's okay to commute to work.
Even if this initiative is effective at reducing crime, I don't want to lose privacy or see a chilling effect in society where people are afraid because they know they're being watched.
But most of it, the overwhelming majority, comprises standalone installations at best networked into a corporate HQ but most commonly just recorded on site.
It's not like in police drama programmes where they can switch from the camera in the Tube station to the one in the newsagent outside for seamless real-time tracking.
Yes, the "Big Scary Numbers" listing CCTV cameras per capita include private cameras, which can outnumber "public" (government, council and police) cameras by orders of magnitude. In the UK these include those owned by businesses and individuals, even things like ring doorbells cameras. There's no real equivalent numbers including that I can find for the USA. In 2024 there were some 16 thousand council operated cameras in London total [0] - well below the ~700k often touted including private cameras.
If you restrict it to just those public cameras, London would barely be in the top 10 of USA cities in public cameras per capita.
Sure, it's not good, but implicit in many comments here is "I'm glad it's not that bad here" (presumably the USA for most commentors), but in reality it is happening "here", has been happening "here" for some time, and in many ways is already much worse "here" already.
While I think many of the UK's actions around this are massive mistake, certainly don't read me as supporting it, at least understand that the big headlines and pointing away from home towards "Orwellian UK" is a misleading distraction.
The concept of the UK "surveillance state" is actually quite overcooked. It's largely based on myth and dramatisation.
BTP probably have a national live feed of railway station cameras. I bloody hope they do, considering it's a rather small, quite centralised police force that covers an enormous rail network, but they are known to have hired "super-recognisers" — skilled CCTV operators — instead.
We have had generations of terror threats to and attacks on our railway system, trains, railway stations. (And the most long-term and persistent of those threats was Irish republican terrorism bankrolled by Americans, for that matter)
But British police generally simply don't have a fully-joined up surveillance system.
We are not tracked from door to door by police cameras; the police control relatively few even in London, and none in most towns. I probably cannot walk through the main part of town without passng a council CCTV camera because two of them are used to keep a pedestrianised road safe, but for the most part I don't think I'd pass one at all.
Councils have cameras for various things — parking and traffic enforcement is a nightmare in small old crowded towns — but police don't always have access to these, even.
(They do where I live because there are actually so few police that we — a town of sixty thousand people — nearly ended up without a police station at all.)
There's a network of traffic cameras on motorways and some urban A roads (traffic is a complex problem in the UK) and one assumes the security services have a feed of that and of the railway station cameras. Again: I want them to.
But we simply do not have and never have had a surveillance system even slightly as capable as the USA has apparently begun rolling out with Flock.
Generally speaking I worry that people outside the UK think the surveillance system in "Hot Fuzz" is real. Most of the time if the British police want to see CCTV footage they have to knock on doors and ask, just like anywhere else.
> We have had generations of terror threats to and attacks on our railway system, trains, railway stations. (And the most long-term and persistent of those threats was Irish republican terrorism bankrolled by Americans, for that matter)
Did it ever cross Britain's mind that the whole IRA debacle is of its own doing? Can't you just leave Ireland for good and let them be?
There are two largely different concepts/epochs separated by more than 40 years.
The negotiations and partition of Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland as a self-governing province (rather than being governed from Britain):
And then the Troubles, which were a sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants within Northern Ireland itself, that stemmed from Protestant oppression of Catholic rights protests (patterned after the US civil rights movement). The Wikipedia pages are really good, but the top level page is great because it covers the early days so well:
Twice I nearly lost my father to terrorism in London. (Sliding Doors commuter moments both times — by sheer chance not being in the very usual place at the very usual time). I remain pretty relaxed about the idea that people who wish to bomb trains and tubes and buses can't get across London without the awareness that they could be tracked.
You cannot live your life paranoid, and while I think the evidence is clear that we need a small readjustment with the security state (as is evidenced by the BBC's extraordinary battle to get them to admit they lied to a court about a neonazi agent) I think it's better to understand that, yes, sometimes people are watching.
Better than the pretence that constitutional rights protect people they clearly do not protect, or that because the CIA or NSA promise not to do something, they aren't doing it.
I don't think there is any benefit in importing the paranoid style of US politics (R. Hofstadter) to the UK. And I think the weird breathless panic Americans have about London is their problem. We, living here, shouldn't choose to imagine it is true, when it isn't. London is safer than every comparable US city and transport policing is a big, big, big part of why. And if freedom-loving Americans have scared themselves too much to visit, I am not sure why we should care.
Where are you getting the perception that Americans generally fear London?
I don't know a single American that has ever expressed any sentiment that London is unsafe. I know a few that have some stupid notions about immigrants in the UK, but that isn't exclusive to people on this side of the pond.
Genuinely, though. Americans just don't worry about safety in London outside of scams and petty crime inherent to any big tourist city.
> We have had generations of terror threats to and attacks on our railway system, trains, railway stations
I think your take might be based on myth and dramatisation too, as well as a misunderstanding of what the purpose of surveillance is (it's not about protecting children, or trains).
And agree with sibling about Ireland: the Troubles would have been solved by getting the hell out.
I invite you to check how the English government is reacting to independentist movements in Scotland and Ireland post-Brexit if you think they're happy to let people be.
> I think your take might be based on myth and dramatisation too,
You are arguing that terrorist attacks on public transport in the UK are mythical or dramatised?
> I invite you to check how the English government is reacting to independentist movements in Scotland and Ireland post-Brexit if you think they're happy to let people be.
This is just a very weird sentence to read; surprised it wasn't weird to write.
> You are arguing that terrorist attacks on public transport in the UK are mythical or dramatised?
What kind of question is that? Did I ask you if you're calling cameras in the UK mythical?
Same as what you said about London, I'm arguing you're dramatising the dire threat of terrorism on the good people sitting in the tube.
In a thread where we're discussing the systematically verified risks of a slippery slope of surveillance measures and the introduction of extremely invasive surveillance in the tube, clutching your pearls about the mean terrorists threatening the public transports for literal generations is a ridiculous exaggeration that carries the same value as "think of the children". How are cameras going to protect you? Do you think they see people's intentions? Even the police didn't use the terrorism excuse for this.
Sorry for the tone, but this wilful misunderstanding of my comments and your statement about the Irish being to blame for the Troubles make it difficult to engage in a gentlemanly manner.
I assume they were always doing it. Now they're doing it above the table so that they can comb through the dataset for petty reasons that don't justify the expense of parallel construction.
Police have been using it in London for several years, mostly at protests, but also in other 'test' deployments. They are currently required (it seems) to place signage around the catchment area to notify the public that facial recognition is in progress. Private companies may well have been using it for longer in their shops without having to notify anyone. Sainsbury's, for instance, quickly attracted suspicion that they were doing trials of it at certain locations.
“Our deployments are intelligence-led and focused on identifying people wanted by the police or courts, including those suspected of serious offences and those who may be breaching bail conditions or court orders”
This is crazy. Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.
This is exactly what happened in Moscow after same tech was launched. It is much 'safer' on streets, since every entrance door and traffic intersection is equipped with cameras now.
But I pick Portugal's approach every time — no public cameras, no dashcams, it is forbidden to record private persons in public without permission.
I’m in Portugal with kids right now and I can not think of a country where dashcams would be more useful.
The standard of driving and adherence to the law of the roads is some of the worst I’ve encountered in Europe.
I haven’t let go of my 9yo’s hand since we arrived in Porto a few days ago. Speeding is chronic and nobody gives a shit for the safety of you or your children here.
Recording everything has a lot of upsides. Unfortunately, downsides for privacy and democracy are very real.
Talking about speeding, not sure. I am driving around Lisbon and speed limit is 50 in city, and lots of speed cameras. Though I am driving at 55 as limit and rarely see anyone going faster than that.
You are in a new country and feel that your kid needs protection, which is perfectly human, but does mean that your opinion is a bit biased.
As sibling comments mention, countries exist with many cameras, public or private, where driving feels worse. I didn't look at road deaths, but I'd be surprised if Portugal is among the leading countries on this.
Equally, if you take a bit of distance, you can realise that Portugal has many other parents living there, yet they are not clamouring for more surveillance: it's difficult to imagine that the Portuguese dictatorial government is evilly preventing its people from accessing the benefits of surveillance.
private citizens should be allowed to record anything. make it strictly forbidden for the government and businesses because they have the power and motivation to abuse it, but that risk doesnt really exist for an ordinary person.
Maybe they should. But I think there is a correlation between "private citizens can't record other citizens" and "almost no cameras around". Coming from a country with a lots of cameras (where people record each other as well), this is a very comforting feeling.
I love the word "including" there. Yes it will be used for people suspected of minor crimes but it also includes people accused serious crimes as well!
This sentence struck me as well. It says what it is focused on, but nothing about what it actually captures.
What I would like to see is something like this:
- The detectors have a per-determined list of suspect faces and only record information when those faces are spotted.
- These detectors keep only a fixed length of recording that is permanently deleted unless it is actively linked to a crime and explicitly held as part of that investigation.
But it says nothing concrete. Just some nonsense about "focus" which doesn't mean anything.
They're hoping people read this as the nonsense notion that they'll only scan criminal's faces. Reality is that everyone's face will be scanned, processed and stored.
How thoughtful. This way the Metro Police know where to find you if some intimidation is due after you questioned the legitimacy of claims made by regime-aligned scholars such as Professor Jason Arday, Ph.D., who ran 600 miles in 6 days and 30 marathons in 35 days.
Putting aside the social and legal implications of this trial, I find it very interesting how projects like this are often trumpeted to be successful and celebrated at launch (rather than when proven to work, or save costs or whatever) as though the hard bit was actually wading for months or years through several government and private IT bureaucracies, not making a system that delivers what it promises.
Brazil was so right. We're just an inference away from being jailed. I'm not from UK but it shows how we are all helpless and see in plain conciousness what is coming. When did we lost the grip?
Those who in power of the state don't want to loose power. A protest, revolt is the best way to overthrow that. So to eliminate that threat is to survey. Install fear and you have control.
> The idea that emerged around the time of the French Revolution that the political spectrum can be divided into a right- and left wing in the first place – it becomes clear that the Left, in its essence, is a critique of bureaucracy, even if it’s one that has, again and again, been forced to accommodate itself in practice to the very bureaucratic structures and mindset it originally arose to oppose. [1]
TBH wrapped baseball bat is still a baseball bat, just because it's wrapped it doesn't mean you can't use it plus the beginning of the video was missing and it was clearly during some protest
but I agree being stabbed should be legal for victim /s
It was not during some protest, many people of all colors nearby supported the person being arrested and told the policeman he's doing a stupid mistake.
Worse is that it's one of a long run of infuriating police state blunders (to put it mildly).
I've often wondered what would happen if you took some near IR, eye safe, ultra bright LEDs and strobed them at 60 Hz from your headgear in an omnidirectional fashion, pointing away from your body and avoiding nearby floor reflections. You'd stick out like a sore thumb (which I wouldn't mind, as I'm not a criminal nor doing anything wrong!) but it would be enough to likely "opt out" of facial recognition via dint of blinding the camera in the vicinity of your face.
Britain has all sorts of laws like "attempting to pervert the course of justice", so you'd have to be very careful to not accidentally cover for a "real criminal", but just to preserve privacy it might work (especially if more than one person did so).
I've never had the guts to do it, but I do really hate facial recognition and all of this surveillance capitalism.
I have it on good authority they have been doing this for years, maybe this is just an increase to inside the station or maybe just a good time to normalise this…
All that would be left is gait and biometric analysis, as well as any electronic signalling coming from the tracking device everyone carries in their pocket.
For what it's worth, as a Brit, I assure you no one cares about this, and it's likely that most people, if asked, would support it.
The UK doesn't value liberty for liberty's sake like the US does. In the US there seems to be this notion that freedom is a universal good, where as in the UK people are quite comfortable with liberties being revoked if it means they feel safer or fewer people are doing things they don't like.
UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next – loud fireworks, energy drinks, smoking, gambling, porn, not wearing headphones on public transport, praying for people having abortions, etc.
While this tech will obviously be used to clamp down on protests that are inconvenient to the government (as we've seen happen with protests in recent UK history), even these measures tend to be popular in the UK. Most protest groups are net-unpopular, therefore any movement the government makes to crack down on say Palestine protests, climate protests or immigration protests, are fairly popular here.
Imo the UK was accidentally a liberal country post-WWII to the early 1990s because of influence from the US, but culturally the UK isn't liberal and never was. We're a very socially conservative country and take a natural dislike to anyone who rocks the boat a little.
These new digital surveillance techniques are very much in line with British cultural conservatism, and follow a long history of UK mass surveillance.
As a Brit who inhabits the US desire for freedom I genuinely struggle to relate to Brits and it always makes me feel less insane when I come on here and find other people who value liberty too. But in my real life, I think I've genuinely only ever met one Brit who has shared my desire for freedom.
I wonder what makes it different than Japan. Japan, also a large island nation with a developed economy, is also socially conservative in most areas—but the people rely on each other to enforce social norms instead of the law. The government is famously hands off, and tends to release statements and public service campaigns about what citizens should do rather than dictating to them what they must do. And the people generally follow the rules!
> the people rely on each other to enforce social norms
This is probably the difference.
Here's a video of a leading UK MP (whose party largely represents upper-middle class white-Brits) reacing to someone doing something he doesn't like on public transport:
The thing is, Japanese are also typically very polite! For minor violations of social protocol, you’re most likely to get a polite request or indirect reminder from someone. (It would be rude to make someone lose face, even someone who is violating a norm!) Yet somehow it works.
The US pays lip service to some major freedoms but I think the reality is far from that. US police crack down violently on protests and have for a long time. Their police are far more violent and vindictive in general. Several states have porn bans. Fireworks are restricted heavily in many places. You can buy a house and end up with a random group of locals controlling what you can and can't do with it. You're looking at it through rose tinted glasses.
On top of that, a lot of the larger restrictions we have are borne out of the USA. The war on drugs. The consequences, and subsequent security restrictions we have, thanks to their 'war on terror'.
I can't speak to other nations, but given the present issues in Britain with two tier policing, they will receive a religious exemption. Which may result in everyone wearing a hijab just for privacy.
Humans are able to identify a person just with general dimensions and how they move. It's probably within the reach of today's machine learning techniques...
I don't see how this is any different from how traffic cameras are used. Hot take, but as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal.
At first this made me upset - why should I be monitored?
Then it hit me, years ago we had policemen/bobbies that would essentially do the same thing. Look at people - notice them.
It’s a shame they didn't launch this as bobbie v2 that would offer people useful services (like the one wearing a funny hat did): a way to alert police, information, directions. Heck it could even offer guidance for those in need to talk to someone. Truly a missed opportunity.
Not really related to the written topic of this page, but I noticed there is a sideways red button with "Leave this site" that redirects you to 'https://www.google.co.uk/'. What could be the incentive behind this? Why not just close the tab?
If you are about to be watched by an abusive person, it may be better to immediately switch the browser to an innocent page rather than possibly closing it down which may look more suspicious.
Technology that began in the private sector, retailers using facial recognition technology to profile customers, has now bled over violently into public life. I strongly believe in the right to be forgotten, and I strongly believe in the right to be peacefully invisible. No flock cameras. No facial recognition cameras. The intrusion and dangers are too great against any benefit.
It's only a matter of time until government forces a social credit score upon all of us back by these cameras.
Sadly, it seems to me that what we are witnessing in our era is a convergence of technology-enhanced surveillance governance globally, greatly eroding personal agency and democratic capacity to institute change.
We desperately need utopian futures but seem to be getting only dystopias regardless of origin state and nominal political ideology: almost as if 1984, Animal Farm, Enemy of the State, Gattaca, Terminator, and THX 1138 had a Waterworld-Mad Max setting.
We should each try to imagine a technology-enabled future utopia and build an enabling technology instead of contributing to this sort of thing - which already exists in most countries not to mention financial surveillance, internet surveillance, mobile phone surveillance, vehicle and commercial flight/ship surveillance.
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.
Als sie die Juden einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.
Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.
To be honest I don't see the point. Anyone committing a crime goes around in a balaclava these days so facial recognition won't be much use. They'd have much more success just banning face coverings and there would be plenty of support for it.
The problems we have are much deeper though. Petty crime is out of control and it's impacting society in obvious ways. Just go to a shop to see the measures they have to take to try to reduce theft. We don't have enough police due to a decade or two of underfunding. And even if we did we don't have enough prison space to even let harder criminals finish out their sentences - so what's the point in arresting petty criminals?
Saying that London is still one of the safest major cities in the world. Safer than any major US city. I've been living here a long time and the worst I've seen is a few phone thefts. I can walk pretty much anywhere safely at any time of the day or night. Don't let the fear mongering online fool you.
The way things keep devolving in Britain, the easiest path is to force everyone to wear a camera on their chest like the police do. Then you can arrest people who don't wear them because surely they have something to hide.
Why would they need to do anything so explicit and crude? Everyone carries a smartphone on them at every waking moment and they chose to do it willingly (though unwitting of the implications for personal privacy). They are also ready to use them for surveillance almost on a hair-trigger impulse these days. Thankfully this works against state services almost as much as it works against the public, as channels like Crimebodge are able to show us. But the point is that the state already knows what these devices represent to them in terms of data collection, and are subtle enough to avoid making this a mandatory situation... For now.
Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?
Comments here seem like an ideological kneejerk response.
You assume it will be used in good faith which is charitable. It doesn't even need to take an authoritarian regime to pervert this technology. Abusive police officers in the US for example use Flock to stalk ex girlfriends.
Yes I'm sure their police force is entirely free of any psychological problems and in no way selects for people who might be incline to abuse their position of authority.
> The report looked at police training requirements in more than 100 countries and found that the US had among the lowest, in terms of average hours required.
> Also, many other countries require officers to have a university degree - or equivalent - before joining the police, but in the US most forces just require the equivalent of a high-school diploma.
> Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?
This same argument would apply to Flock cameras, correct?
honestly, i've found that it's usually better to not engage in these threads. the likelihood of a good faith discussion is very low. as you point out, it's mostly ideological kneejerk reactions rather than actual discussion based on considered viewpoints. but i'll give it a go.
i personally don't like this for a few reasons. possibility of data leaks, ick factor via my built-in paranoia around being watched/recorded, possibility of false positives etc. but i have some faith in TfL / BTP to not piss about in an egregious way. we have pretty decent checks and balances these days for UK police compared to the past and definitely compared to some police forces in the states. i'm also aware that as a man i tend to not experience the same shit that a lot of women have to deal with on a daily basis.
so i might be willing to accept it as part of a necessary trade-off based on my real life experiences on the tube. i'd probably be willing to accept having my face recorded/pattern matched when using the tube if it either stops or helps to prosecute a sexual assault.
there is definitely a difference between liking something and accepting it.
The “main character” syndrome is strong here .. thing is, most people wouldn’t even be the main character in a movie about their own lives .. also if this helps catch criminals/terrorists/thieves .. what’s the actual harm to an innocent passenger ..
I’ve used the London underground. I wouldn’t let my kids go on it alone. I welcome this tbh. I don’t see what else they’re supposed to do other than have permanent guards on every wagon and every corner 24/7
I mean lets be honest if you are up to no good and there are facial scanners, you'd just throw on your n95 mask and black hoodie, maybe stick a pebble in your shoe, and then poof this tech no longer stops the bad guys.
There are also cases where law enforcement misuses this sort of technology to stalk romantic interests. So your kids could very well be stalked by a pervert in law enforcement more effectively with this technology.
So, massive invasion of privacy, but will only catch stupid criminals (and unsuspecting people who happen to have a strong resemblance with a criminal in the database?).
reply