Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- The UK already has so much CCTV. Some believe it reduces drug-related, vehicle, and property crime, but most agree is has virtually no effect on violent crime (https://www.college.police.uk/research/crime-reduction-toolk...).
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.
by smurda - > The UK already has so much CCTV.
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.
by dingaling - 21st century authoritarianism. Humans learned nothing from the 20th century.by proc0
- 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...by root-parent
- This time is different, they say.by HPsquared
- Worse, the children of the hippies have become reactionary bigots.by zombot
- 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.by cyanydeez
- Humans learned a lot. They learned some ways that don't work. That's why Germany learned to be more subtle, UK learned it needs more surveillance, France learned to ban face coverings, not Muslims, and USA learned how to properly stack the courts.by inigyou
- I just went through airport security. It’s been coming a long time. 2001 made a lot of people in the US, at least, normalize big brother.
- I'd argue that they actually learned it well, that's why we see anti-privacy stuff like this and Chat Control.by s5ma6n
- I noticed that in my country delivery couriers on e-bikes sometimes cover their face completely, with a balaclava and a ski mask. They ride at high speeds around pedestrians, break all traffic rules and obviously they prefer to opt out from facial recognition.
Maybe we should start wearing masks in public too. There is no upsides in going around with an open face.
by codedokode - In France and Germany it's illegal to wear a mask in public. If it's not already in the UK, I'm sure it soon will be.by inigyou
- 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.by danw1979
- 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.
by freakynit - This is never going to fly, and expecting it is waste of time and energy that could have been used more productively.
Think for a second or two about the type of folks who get, succeed and even thrive in politics over decades. Not your regular Joe, not a nice friendly balanced individual. No, biggest fuckups with massive daddy issues, school bullies, unresolvable inferiority complexes, sociopaths to the core, for whom the lure of money and power over others trumps everything else. This is the default, regardless of country. Look at politics through such optics and many things will start to make sense, also one would gain more realistic expectations from those folks.
Now, why would such people ever allow that, to expose all their deep flaws to whole world?
by kakacik - Don't forget it's constantly used to track, harass, and stalk the ex girlfriends/wives of the very fragile men in our police force.
- 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?by type0
- they already put more people in jail than any other country for expressing the wrong opinions on social networksby ekianjo
- > The hubris for surveillance in UK is staggering
Yet the UK doesnt have private systems such as Flock like the US does.
by alt227 - 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.
by Traster - 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.by jambalaya8
- Because I guess if it's not proven to be effective if they use some known test cases, then they won't roll out to the whole networkby ChrisRR
- 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.
by foldr - 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.by fragmede
- 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.
by tarxvf - I don't think it's very scientific, more of a procurement process.by ra
- 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!"
by gspr - 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.
by sarjann - 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.by cedws