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.
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.
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'.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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...
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Britain is the original Orwellian society!!
They even practice DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink in Blighty, especially in government and parliamentary circles.
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.
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.
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'.
you don't even need all of that to track people.
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.
If people would not steal stuff from shops, the shops would not need cameras. We get the society our behavior creates.
Isn't analytics the main reason for having cameras all over a store these days?
Do the cameras stop people stealing?
And yet, crime is doing fine. This tells you what the surveillance state is really for.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Citation please. "Proactively" is just untrue.
There’s a specific GDPR carve out as outlined by the ICO here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So flash bang grenades to peaceful protesters skulls is okay? Shooting rubber bullets at peaceful protesters eyes is okay?
As usual, it depends. "Peaceful" is a very subjective term. Like the mostly peaceful but fiery protests in Wisconsin.
None of what they said could logically lead to that conclusion.
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 network
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!"
There’s also transparency theatre here. “If it WAS part of a nefarious system, surely we wouldn’t be talking about it so openly?”
It’s especially disappointing when the entire system is foiled by the balaclavas worn by so many of the country’s criminals every day anyway.
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).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Men...
Perhaps facial recognition would have saved him? It's not like humans are 100% accurate as this demonstrates
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...
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
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.
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.
Why wait till they’re on public transport if you’re going to arrest them before they even arrive at the protest?
The easiest way to stop protests is to listen to your constituents and implement the changes they desire. That's what a representative democracy is.
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?
Either. Where there is a need.
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.
> The latter is legitimate, isn't it?
No, arresting people for crimes they haven’t committed is horrifying and bizarre.
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.
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).
Last one was in 2017 though.
There might not be a publicly known area for that protest.
Then it’s most likely going to be a very small protest.
Might be, we will see.
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.
The UK stopped being a democracy a long time ago.
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.
So what you are saying is this is what you want as citizens, to be surveilled and tracked by police 24/7?
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.
> the capabilities and resources that the police have to track us 24/7 are an order of magnitude less than Google or Meta has.
This will be a good argument when Google or Meta are able to arrest you.
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.
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.
> 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.
Miranda is an American case and has no relevance to UK law, the precedents aren't interchangeable.
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.
can't wait for these to normalize https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cyberpunk+oni+mask&iar=images
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.
> 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.
Erich Mielke smiles from his grave.
21st century authoritarianism. Humans learned nothing from the 20th century.
I'd argue that they actually learned it well, that's why we see anti-privacy stuff like this and Chat Control.
This time is different, they say.
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.
Worse, the children of the hippies have become reactionary bigots.
More like a good bunch of the hippies were in it just to have a good time. And then happily built the system we know.
it's the hand-wringing do-gooders that implemented all of the authoritarian practices in the uk.
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.
Puritans?
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.
Right idea, wrong sect I guess
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...
All right, mate, let's hear your plan for securing the UK's south-eastern coastline.
Sharks and tornados, and imagine if we can combine them!
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.
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.
Such wrongthink can't go unpunished.
“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.
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.
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.
In Greece and Italy they drive at least as bad as in Portugal, if not much worse, and dashcams are perfectly legal.
I’d also suggest searching for the classic “Russian dashcam videos” on YouTube.
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.
Could easily be used to track people who posted something bad on Twitter.
Could? Will.
"Could"? Have you seen what they've been doing to protesters?
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.
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?
Unlike Brazil the movie it's quite hard to actually end up in jail in the UK. The courts lean more towards letting criminals walk.
Note to readers: Brazil the Terry Gilliam Kafkaesque movie, not the country.
Thanks, in my view this is a masterpiece, but it might not be obvious to everyone. That you got the reference makes my day.
Brazil was also right about the levels of competence within the bureaucracy.
Need to rewatch with the kids
The 1960's was about the time in history when investment went in to surveillance programs.
Computer recognition has been around for a very long time, and has always been on the edge for spying on citizens.
It's accelerated now because we have future technology that they didn't have back then.
But stemming from which need? Cold war?
There's never just one. Mainly political.
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]
[1] Computers and Surveillance Scandals in the 1960s-70s - https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03952774v1/document
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.
They weren't? That's more surprising given the UK surveillance state.
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.
Getting political here a bit, but:
> 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?
> 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?
That people still ask this question betrays only that they aren't well-informed about what actual issues led to the Troubles.
Tell us more! I don't know anything about it either. Couldn't the UK have ceded it to Ireland? Or would the problems just have gone another direction?
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):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Ireland
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
> based on myth and dramatisation
> 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.
This is a mature and considered take. But I’m sure you’ll agree: incompetence is not a reliable defence.
So what happens when using and optimising these systems becomes a priority for the state?
The apparatus is there, and capabilities can catch up to opportunities it presents.
I have to tell you I am not that bothered.
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.
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.
Sainsbury's and B&M and a couple of others use Facewatch, I think.
A very badly run system, but alas no better or worse than USA stores and malls are doing.
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.
Just gonna drop this here for no particular reason
https://urban-privacy.com/pages/anti-surveillance-clothing
Lest they commit the offense of buying a baseball bat or being stabbed?
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).
so people in UK streets normally carry on their shoulder 2 meters tall cross?
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.
police have been running facial recognition at london protests for years already. so is this just making it official?
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:
https://www.facebook.com/libdems/videos/stop-the-headphone-d...
Note the passivate aggression, then the threat to use state force to stop it.
British people are too polite to tell people to stop doing things. We prefer that to be a responsibility of the police.
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.
> UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next...gambling
The UK is banning gambling? Really?
mask up.
How will this handle face masks? Hijabs or Niqabs?
Direct classification as bad actor with bad intentions.
More like an automatic green pass looking at the historical treatment of some criminals with such background.
For one of the three yup
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.
Do you have some examples of "two tier policing"?
baseball cap and sunglasses will do just fine.
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.
> as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal
The amount of recent cases in the US is enough for me to not place any faith in the fact that this system would not be abused.
> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available
Looking forward to seeing the singnage there.
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.
This must be especially inconvenient for those with criminal physiognomy.
Or really, in the anarcho-tyrannistic structures Western countries have turned into, those who don't.
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.
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.
> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available
So what is the point ?
In Beijing underground doesn't scan people's faces.
They also don't arrest for internet memes.
Just saying.
Fascist monarchy has facist policies shocker. So glad I left that hell hole.
Oi, you have a loicense for that mate?
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.
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.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument.
> 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?
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.
[delayed]