To provide clarity, this isn't (yet) (publicly) hooked up to the whole CCTV network of London Underground stations. Instead they use these temporary portable stations you can see at the end of the linked article.
I went to Victoria station where they were doing this yesterday and the police seemed quite unhappy with me taking photos of them operating the facial recognition station and confronted me almost immediately. The irony...
The area they were doing it in was completely swarming with far more police officers than usual, supposedly to "provide information".
I had expected to see signs all around the station warning passengers that this trial was taking place, but the only ones I saw were directly in that area or by the stairs as you're walking down into it. They weren't small enough that I could characterise them as intentionally hard-to-miss, but I reckon with the amount of traffic going down that staircase, the overwhelming majority of people would not have actually been aware that they were being subject to this LFR trial. I didn't see a single person other than myself pausing to read the signs.
Edit: There also wasn't a single sign inside the gateline where you'd tap out and walk into the area that the camera station was pointing at. I asked the police why this was, and they claimed it was because the cameras are only positioned to capture people entering the station, not exiting. Maybe that's true, as long as you don't turn around at any point? I'm not convinced.
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.
On the one hand, yes: the UK is demonstrably "this is fine" when it comes to mass surveillance.
On the other: the government is almost pathologically bad at joined-up thinking.
To illustrate the latter: I have been sent exactly one speeding ticket. It was for a car I had sold 6 months previous to the offence. The police force was somehow unaware of this.
To add: same happened in russia around 2018 on a couple of subway stations in St.-Pete and in moscow at first
the result? faster tracking and arrests of people for checks who were deemed too problematic + (i.e. with anti-war protests in 2022) the cameras were used to track or threat tracking almost everyone who protested, and lowering the load on the police by coming to the dwellings afterwards in the next several days or even weeks without the need to do it there and then
in 2018-2021 it was still possible to overwhelm the holding capacity of jails in major cities, but after mass tracking it more or less became obsolete
It's worth pointing out this is specifically not mass tracking. LFR scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.
To continue GP’s point, in Moscow a “database of outstanding wanted suspects” was enough to get a well-known science writer[1] who publicly expressed her opposition to the war systematically harrassed by the police because she (a then-pregnant woman) matched a database record for, I kid you not, a draft evader. Reportedly some of the officers even admitted the absurdity[2] of the situation but, well, computer says detain.
[1] Asya Kazantseva
[2] Women can be subject to the draft if they’re doctors, radio engineers, or one of a handful of other professions, but thus far it’s very uncommon and either way not applicable in her case.
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
I have some sympathy for this as shoplifting is getting worse. Also, an acquaintance of mine works as a security guard at a Tesco and was attacked and injured with a syringe earlier this year, luckily he's ok but they haven't caught the attacker. The cameras at the time did not have facial recognition, though I can't judge if that would have made a difference.
Thieves might ignore checkout completely, but there are also cameras capturing everyone entering and leaving the shop.
No, in the UK they can't just take your finger and press it to your phone or point it at your face to unlock it. They can service you a notice demanding access to your phone, and not providing access is a crime.
In most countries they can. Which is why you should (in a perfect world) have password or fingerprint unlock, and if you use the fingerprint, the phone wipes itself. Not even Graphene supports this.
You still have a separate password that authenticates you without biometrics.
The touch + passcode is nice because even if someone watches you enter your passcode it won't matter unless they can spoof the fingerprint reader too, which is highly unlikely. And you can use a much shorter passcode for convenience.
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Though this is true, many supermarkets use this as a scare tactic instead of surveillance. I know a few people who work in supermarkets and when when incidents happen they can't use footage from the self-checkouts because they're not recording.
I do wonder if the cameras exist in the machines so one day they can be recording and performing face recognition however.
Reminds me of a story I read long ago. (And Snowden's point that even if the current government uses such powers responsibly, a future government may not be so kind...)
---
R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?
D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.
If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.
R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...
D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.
R.E: Could I get some food?
D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,
"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"
Documenting birth is legally required since the 1800s and gets sent to a national index. The state will have a name associated with them since birth making them unable to be anonymous.
Oyster is still anonymous, in the sense that no details are required to buy a card, and it can be topped up using cash. The cards can be returned or disposed of as necessary. But as you say, it knows your movements at least in so far as your entry and exit point in the system, with a timestamp, though you can use a separate card for each if you don't mind paying the full fare that gets charged when a journey is 'incomplete'. The barriers also still currently accept paper tickets, but for how long will be anyone's guess. I would assume that as Travelcards can be tied to paper National Rail tickets, it will still be some time until that goes away. I see a lot more people using eTickets these days, and trains even have adverts now reminding people to keep their phones charged to be able to show their ticket to inspectors.
I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.
As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been finessed into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.
Self-checkout at the grocery store is a major vector for shoplifting. That's why the cameras are there.
If I was running such a store, I wouldn't want to spend the money on those cameras. But alas, the money is well spent in stopping thieves.
I was talking to one of the staff in a grocery store a while ago. He said the corporate auditors came in one day and decided to review the security cams. The result was half the staff was fired for theft.
It's just too bad that we live in a low trust society.
Not only there are cameras, but the machines typically accept only cards and not cash (except for one supermarket chain in my city) so I never use self-checkout.
But the cameras on the UK self-checkouts only point at your face. How does that stop anything other than casual opportunistic theft of low value items by inculcating some kind of pre-crime guilt feeling? Professional shoplifters (if that isn't an oxymoron) have much more subtle means to carry out their trade, or not as the case may be, depending on their target, usually carried out long before they reach any kind of till.
THe one of the face is to ID you, and the one in the barcode area is to work out if you've slapped a sticker for 1kg potatoes on a packet of 1kg of meat.
The face one is to show you that you're on camera, the other one is to detect the fruad. THe cameras in the ceiling aren't high enough resolution to work out if your doing a switcheroo or not.
Basically its a full service package. with the three cameras, it makes it very hard to argue that it wasn't you who did it, that the swap of barcode was a simple error, and that it was just a mistake.
The cameras here are in the ceiling, and they watch to see if you are scanning the merchandise before putting it in the bag. I presume they are AI-trained to catch this.
I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.
There are almost certainly more cameras to catch the stealing on tape too. But when the camera or even a person sees you swipe something, they are gonna want to have a pic of your face to be able to know who you are, especially so they can recognize repeat offenders. Next time you show up, they might be looking for their most notorious thieves so they can call police, point to you and hand them a video of the last time you stole.
Not all machines lead to increase in the standard of living, and many things that would improve the standard of living are not done. At some point the argument you have made becomes irrelevant and cliched.
It was implied. Why else would you use that argument in responding to ridgeguy's comment about using human-run checkout lines? What machines would you point to as making the world worse?
In any case, since it bothers you so, you explained the situation yourself: "The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier."
It's an error to equate "cheaper" to "increase in standard of living" because the people benefiting from the reduction in cost are usually not the entirety of the community, and it's unfortunate that someone of your caliber accepts such lazy thinking.
Over the last twenty years, automation has increased but the standard of living has gotten worse.
You both miss the crux of the argument, i think. It would be more precise to say that physical machines raise the standard of living that we measure, but abstract machines reduce that which we don't measure. (Viz, finance.)
Compared to a generation ago, we can stuff more crap in our pockets and wardrobes, but housing is precarious and public institutions are weaker. Good luck supporting a family on a bottom-quartile wage.
I scan and bag while I shop, so self-checkout is just paying. It's barely a shift of work from cashier to me, because I have to pick things up and place them in my bag/basket/trolley anyway, scanning them as I do is barely an increase in work.
I highly doubt that story as camera footage is audited remotely (the store staff know nothing about it), and half the staff is way too high (to not be detected on the ground).
I know this is the standard response, but it doesn't make sense. If you're going to steal something, why would you expose it at the checkout? Wouldn't you just not bring it out at that point? It's the same for the really annoying scales that some supermarkets insist on that weigh every item you as you pack it, which makes packing really hard.
The whole thing feels like post hoc justification for bad design (or bad understanding of the usage).
I think the idea is that you'll go to the check out with several items and only present some of them and then skip the one that is expensive. If you just walk out of the store several times with items you haven't paid for, they might catch and ban you immediately.
The savings that a store has from self checkouts far outweigh the shoplifting it attracts. I don’t see what the cameras add. Do stores review camera footage at the end of the day and then hunt down the offenders?
They can catch legitimate mistakes. I had this happen about a week ago. I scanned something, thought I heard the beep, then put it in the bag. It stopped me and replayed the video. I looked at the item list and sure enough, it didn't scan. It was an honest mistake, and the camera caught it. I rescanned it after the attendant cleared the error.
I've also had it flag when it thinks there is more stuff in my cart when going to pay. This happened to me when I had an umbrella in my cart. The attendant had to come over and clear it. When I worked at a grocery store 20+ years ago, checking that there was nothing on the bottom of the cart was a big thing for cashiers; the cameras seem to automate this check at self-checkout.
I've also had if false flag when I pass my hand over in a way that looks questionable, where the attendant has to come review the video and clear it.
All this stuff happens in real-time during the checkout process.
For people who want to steal, they seem to find ways around it. I was at the store a couple months ago (the same one that has all the tech mentioned above) and the beep next to me sounded ever so slightly off. I looked over, the guy was on the payment screen, which I'm assuming disables a lot of the camera checks, and was passing all his items over the scanner and making the beep noise with his mouth. The tone wasn't perfect, but it was really close.
Primarily used to catch and ban from the shop heavy repeat offenders, some people shop lift on order and resell items versus use them for them selves, or have addiction problems with alcoholism etc.
They just dirty the airwaves with whatever lies they want to justify spying. Drag them to court where they have to be honest and well, their BS is revealed.
The low trust side is entirely on the rich owners class side of the divide.
Academics and credentialed class take some blame here too; of course no one is going to be capable of a task or job without their coursework. Nevermind expertise in $thing been around since before their class
Capitalism has turned everyone into a fucking Udemy sales pitch.
Only 30% of people have seen a mental health professional since 2020. Everyone else does what we used to do; rather than pay a modern day preacher for faith healing[1] we have friends.
My local coop (I will not share the articles, because doxing) caught someone trying to smuggle >£300 of stuff out of the store. its a tiny store, maybe medium cornershop sized.
at the start of the year, I personally saw 4 shop liftings happen. I know the staff well, they told me after one of the events that at the present rate they are loosing something like £1500 a week.
They now have a security guard, which has lowered the problem, but not stopped it.
Maybe not organised like the mafia but you 100% get crackheads shoplifting in an organised fashion to get money for drugs in London, and self checkouts obviously make this easier.
Not unheard of to get crackheads trying to sell you stolen supermarket meat out of a bag if you hang around in some of the less salubrious pubs
No, it's metric. Our schools are flooded with 30cm rulers. You'll see kids as young as 8 with 330ml drinks. Some even count in decimal - there is no end in sight
there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...
Yes, but as I said it is possible to use a separate ID for entry and exit, so unless they were willing to perform a CCTV trawl then your entire journey could not be assessed. The penalty for this kind of anonymity is paying top fare for entry and exit, so only a very rich tube user could bear the cost. The thing that got people to use Oyster in the first place was 'discounted' prices, as in they bumped the price for a paper ticket when Oyster cards were introduced and kept the old prices for Oyster only journeys. Make of that what you will. Paper tickets are still available as of 2026 last time I checked.
There was a similar data trawl when Boris bikes were introduced, and some of the information gleaned from that was quite hilarious but I can't find a link because it was from the old world and now lost in enshitted search.
I think the point with those supermarket cameras is to influence behaviour, not to surveil, I doubt they are even recording. When I was a kid (maybe in a worse area than you) there were CRT TVs by entrances of supermarkets showing a live feed of you walking in. People behave differently when they feel they are being watched, it's why they have creepy CCTV posters with big eyes on them. Probably the same reason for evil eye charms too.
Yes, this has been under consideration when thinking just how much raw footage would have to be stored for 4 or more self-checkout cameras for every shop. Probably multiple terabytes per day, per chain, just for London. There is also the classic 'plastic camera with blinking LED' CCTV installation, intended to deter theft in a more lo-fi manner.
As an aside, the artist John Baldessari made an installation in the Tate Modern where you were filmed walking into a room and the image was projected on the wall, but with about a 10 second delay, so that the feedback loop between seeing yourself 'on screen' and being able to influence it was completely broken. It was quite interesting to experience.
About 8 or 9 years ago I saw a self checkout pos provider demo a camera/screen system that would do basic images processing constantly to try and take pictures when people are clearly visible. A couple of low res, low colour palette, cropped images per user are much much easier to store. This was at a security conference.
Fair enough, sounds like a reasonable compromise, but I still question the entire premise of having these cameras in the first place, especially since they do not film the area where items are being handled. Tallying a loss of stock to a specific person would seem to be really quite difficult to do with only a set of photographs of the faces of everyone who utilised the self-checkouts within a certain period.
Which is again, a fair question with a reasonable answer:
Stores have loss 'prevention' (more like tracking) software which the security team can use. They are able to attach images of people stealing, but its hard to identify a person from a camera 15ft away when they are bent over a shelf; so they attach images of them stealing and of them passing through choke points - e.g. checkouts and entrances.
Tying them together is laborious, and is currently in its own little model rush - it's a technique called re-identification.
However, the next question is why doesn't it happen in practice? Well the stores have found police to be uniquely annoying on that they won't arrest and the state won't prosecute despite clear evidence.
You only need 3-5 fps SD video and with motion sensing you only record when there is a customer at the self-checkout. Technically, it is absolutely doable.
Primary theft at them is where you scan N cheap items and just bag Y expensive item without scan and walk out, plausible deniability/psychology at play, a lot less deniability if you shove a whisky bottle down your trousers.
In Spanish supermarkets, it's tins of shellfish in the anti-theft boxes. In English ones, it's razor blades and menstrual pads. Spirits are often tagged in both countries, but not as consistently as the mejillones and the tampons.
I wrote in another comment but basically yes. Also they can focus on other cases that require physical presence. No need to patrol the entire subway, put 100 police officers to just patrol, every station when you can have 2-3 guys watch the cameras and just 2-3 patrols ready for intervention.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state
I have no idea what you are referring to here but that is most certainly not the case in most democratic countries. Where common carrier or telecom immunity is a thing they do not want to know more than they are legally obliged to know.
Indeed, this is not the case in the UK. Its too fucking expensive, and the paper work to approve that is too fucking hard. Most of the time the state will request search logs from google instead. its far cheaper and much higher signal to noise.
Also "intercept" evidence is inadmissible in court, so its not all that useful for convicting people.
Don't get me wrong, the UK like the USA has the ability to do all of this. But its used for specific actions (ie find a bomb-y needle in a haystack) where direct action is required.
AS I said, intercepted evidence won't convict someone here because it can't be used as evidence. so if they see that your messaging someone about planning some attrocity, you'll have to be caught in the act of planning, or a physical device with the messages have to be found.
It's worth being aware the current police implementation of police LFR is explicitly not doing "tracking": it scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.
And the thing that absolutely fucks me off about all of this, is that we don't even get a lawful society in exchange for all of this. On one hand, there's no privacy anywhere. On the other - have your car stolen or a bike? House broken into? Phone snatched out of your hands? Good luck getting anyone to care about this in the slightest. You'd think with all the surveillance tech we'd be living in a nightmare panopticon, but at least petty crime should be eliminated, but nope, sometimes I wonder what's the point of being a law abiding citizen if just stealing has zero consequences and just seems not prosecuted at all.
Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.
And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????
There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.
It's strange to me that in your bubble you think the police in the UK are mainly there to hassle the "Palestine" protestors and interrupt their peaceful "From the river to the sea" chants.
I would say it's a lot more serious that they did nothing to stop the organized Pakistani child-rape gangs, out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it.
Either way I can agree with you that it doesn't seem like the police in the UK are using their great power to do much good.
Specifically, think about the reaction you are having based on 1/ your perceived outcomes and 2/ their explanations for it. They seem pretty aligned to me, based on where you are directing your anger. So job well done on their part.
> out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it.
this didnt happen btw
the grooming gangs have largely had white perpetrators and all investigations into the police found that they simply do not listen to women, specially those of working class.
Rotherdam where the big asian men case was found, it lasted 17 years and the police had been investigated twice and failed catastrophically both times. With severe reforms recommended and never implemented. And the fear of being racist had never come up.
The case of the grooming gangs gained attention in 2011. And in 2016 the ex chief of police AFTER being investigated and fired due to gross errors then said that he didnt do more because he was afraid of being called racist.
The subsequent report in 2020 from the conservative goverment had that line too, although it also had copy pasted lines from american far right think tanks.
It seems like a convinient excuse to the fact that the police have shown 0 interest in helping poor people in the country for decades, and have shown misogynistic and racist behaviour in every internal investigation ever done (including the 750 page one done after a cop ra ped and murdered Sarah Everrat)
But I guess decades of internal reviews, consistent problems highlighted and demands for police reform can all be ignored due to the convinient excuse of a fired imbecile who allowed hundreds of girls to be hurt under his watch. There was video evidence, he saw and was brought to a judge and ignored because he thought all girls from council states are basically whores. But I am sure he didnt stop it because the people doing it in his case were pakistani. The grooming gang in scotland that were all white must have been because the cops thought the gang might also be foreign? The school grooming gang in Nottingham which was a catholic school and the priests were just moved, those cops also feared that jesus was pakistani?
I think it's even worse than that. If at some remote possibility that a criminal does get caught and charged with a crime, the prisons are full (37% foreign criminals [0]) so they won't do any prison time, and therefore no justice is served. In fact our prisons are so full, violent criminals are being let out after serving only their half term [1].
> violent criminals are being let out after serving only their half term
G20 country prison systems that I'm aware of have early release programs, it's almost a requirement to optimise what space there is for those that most deserve prison.
What's at issue with [1] is where, in actual fact, do a couple of teenagers who nicked a quad bike and likely very unintentionally also'd a manslaughter fall on the "violent criminal" spectrum.
It's incorrect at a minimum. Reading the source provided:
>76,869 British nationals were recorded in the prison population at the end of the first quarter of 2024. The remainder of the population was made up of 10,422 foreign nationals, making up 11.9% of the total population, with an additional 578 having no nationality recorded.
It seems the 37% figure may have come from an entry in the table breaking down those non-British nationalities by country:
It's isolated and out of context, at the very least it needs an indication of the proportion of foreign born people in London, a major city with a large international population.
At one extreme, if the population of London happened to be almost entirely foreign born then it would seem that UK citizens are working overtime at London crime.
You can probably thank Thatcher and the cabal of idiots dumber than lettuce that is the Tory party. Squeeze the poor, squeeze the state budget that even the police force is under-resourced, give the money to their buddies.
Norway is rich and socialist. I was there a while ago and their billboards had ads from their national refugee council asking for donations... on the Friday evening there was a march for Palestine in downtown Oslo. Imagine how well that would go down in the UK "society".
It's called anarchy-tyranny, where the government fails to enforce basic laws and keep people safe from real criminals (anarchy), but instead uses its power to tightly control, tax, and punish ordinary, law-abiding citizens (tyranny). There are various conspiratorial theories for why this happens but I think the simplest explanation is that an ineffective government cannot deal with criminals and goes after the easier and more compliant targets instead.
"Anarchy" in that phrase is fucking wrong. Unsophisticated people assume that anarchy means "no rules", which is false. It means no rulers, not no rules. (More precisely, it means no non-rulers.)
A better term would be "warlordism", if you want to emphasise the lawlessness of the financial class, or maybe "feudalism" to emphasise that the financial class and the political class are congruent.
Are you one of those people who think riding an electric motorcycle across our parks and on cycling paths is completely fine and just kids messing about? Or did you just miss that part of my comment?
That has been the trend for decades in lots of other developed countries as well. It doesn't have to be in any way because of increased means of surveillance.
Correct. It's another thing that's hard to come to terms with - I know that statistically robberies, theft and violent crimes are going down. But I also know several people who had their garages broken into and their bikes and cars stolen. And in every one of these cases, the police won't even show up to look at the damage, take fingerprints, literally nothing - it's just "here's a case number, contact your insurer, we'll call you back if we ever find anything". In fact I know one guy in Manchester who had his Range Rover stolen, then found it in a supermarket car park 2 days later. Rang the police and they were literally like "well, if you have the keys then just....take it back". And he was like "wait, you don't want to come over, check it for fingerprints, drugs, any trace of anything that would help you find the criminals?". And they basically said no, they have no officers available, so just take the car and tell your insurer the case is closed and you got the car back, that's it.
I know the anecdotes don't help - they are just anecdotes. But man, it really doesn't fill me with confidence that I'd be given much help if this happened to me.
No, man, anecdotes are more often than not pure misinformation. You live in a country where car theft has absolutely plummeted in the last 30 years. Look it up, I guarantee it. 100 %. I'm almost certain it's the same for bike theft too.
Frankly this is the least of the problems we have.
There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.
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 noticed that in my country delivery couriers on e-bikes sometimes cover their face completely, with a balaclava and a ski mask. They ride at high speeds around pedestrians, break all traffic rules and obviously they prefer to opt out from facial recognition.
Maybe we should start wearing masks in public too. There is no upsides in going around with an open face.
It will be fine. Most Brits are comfortable with the poor quality of Orwell commentary from over the pond. American Orwell fans mostly don't even read his key novels like Keep the Aspadistra Flying, just his juvenile science fiction stuff.
In an interview with Ron Martinetti of American Legends website, Laura Huxley called Island "the finest and final work." In Laura's opinion, "He put everything in that. Brave New World was a warning and Island was an offering."
I'm a huge fan of Eric Blair's writing. Looking at the bookshelf now: "Down and out in Paris and London" is what I've reread the most (I've got two copies, one ready for gifting).
Demoting Orwell's masterpieces (1984 and Animal Farm) to "juvenile science fiction stuff" while holding up Keep the Aspidistra Flying—a mid-tier social realism novel about a middle-class poet struggling with commercialism—is top-tier British condescension (extra points for misspelling Aspidistra while doing so).
How else can you keep ahead of the bots and their em-dashes other than by the use of pointless condescension and subtle misspellings? I mean, you've got to find a niche somehow.
To be fair, while I enjoyed the fun language shenanigans and propaganda and political commentary of 1984, the actual plot was pretty bad imho. Then again one way of reading it is the protagonist is actually paranoid and is exaggerating everything, which isn't entirely a dig against Orwell. He was just aheaf of the curve with self insert fan fiction.
I think my favorite part of the book was when it just turned into reading the political thesis on the essence of oligarichal collectivism or whatever it is. It's a great cynical parody of modern society, but I still think everyone misses the point is that it isn't so much about surveillance as it's about power through language.
You could just as easily have the book set in 1884 without any of the "future tech" and have basically the same plot going around with busybodies and peeping toms filling the rolls of the telescreens.
The issue with all this surveillance is that it always ends up with suppression of dissent and silencing of opposition by abusing enforcement agencies.
All such surveillance should start with 24-hour live video feed of private lives of all politicians... they carry immense power and control, and thus, warrant an equally powerful monitoring and scrutiny compared to common people.
This is never going to fly, and expecting it is waste of time and energy that could have been used more productively.
Think for a second or two about the type of folks who get, succeed and even thrive in politics over decades. Not your regular Joe, not a nice friendly balanced individual. No, biggest fuckups with massive daddy issues, school bullies, unresolvable inferiority complexes, sociopaths to the core, for whom the lure of money and power over others trumps everything else. This is the default, regardless of country. Look at politics through such optics and many things will start to make sense, also one would gain more realistic expectations from those folks.
Now, why would such people ever allow that, to expose all their deep flaws to whole world?
Why... because you can use their own argument to make your case as a common person... for example, you just gave one of those: "...to expose all their deep flaws to whole world?" Everyone has those.. why should common people give away those.
It's not about making it happen on them.. it's about forcing them to defend this application on them.. and then using the same argument to application on common people...
As The Joker famously said: "It's about sending a message" lol :)
The surveillance of China without the prosperity or safety. At least in China I can leave my bag or laptop out of sight for a moment, same cannot be said of my home city of London. What good is all of this when hard criminals are let out of prison after 6 months. Clown country.
The hubris for surveillance in UK is staggering, what will they do next - roll out the social score system so you'll be banned from taking the tube if you express too much non sanctioned thoughts online?
I'm waiting for them to turn every wifi router in 3D tracking nodes that monitor the exact location and body position of everyone nearby in buildings. Its too juicy of target once they get the tech fully figured out.
I wonder when the catch all "death threats" ever became a commonly accepted excuse for locking people up. That should be reserved for cases where people are a threat to others, which is only tangentially related to the direct statements they have made.
Lucy Connolly is the archetypal case. Tell me in your own words what Lucy did and whether she should have been punished. Make sure to quote the entire tweet.
Going by the imaged tweet in https://x.com/piersmorgan/status/1925826687679279491 she expressed dissatisfaction with government immigration policies and advocated for vigilante action to compensate for perceived failures of the government including the destruction of housing facilities. The framing also makes it clear that the statement was an emotional response to very real crimes that have been committed and which to this day have not been adequately addressed by the government. Meanwhile she made only a vague call to action without any concrete plan that could lead anyone without an agenda to believe that she would be following through with it. Essentially, she committed barely more than a thought crime. If you think that this is the kind of person that people who have demonstrated their willingness and ability to commit violent crimes should be released to make prison space for then you are absolutely bonkers.
I guarantee you that exactly the same statement made about other groups would not even lead to an investigation.
I've seen too many that didn't post targeted death threats.
Also of people who posted stuff that could be interpreted as vague calls to action when riots were happening.
It becomes notewhorty tho that those people of note making a facebook posts got punished harder than the average rioter and reprisal seems to disproportionately target action that establishment might feel threathened by.
From my experience it's easy to find plenty similar or even more direct or more hatefull messages or calls to action regarding other places, events or more minor movements. But those come from minorities or involve movements with less momentum or movements abroad.
On the one hand, I hate the expansion of authoritarian power by the state.
On the other, I do think that we should put people in prison for posting on facebook. That way I won't have to keep seeing my crazy uncle at family gatherings!
I can't help but think you'll get a lot more crazy uncles as more people subconsciously (and consciously) feel the social contract has been broken and democratic deficits persist.
There will just be more social cooling with all the dog whistles that follow.
Not surprised by this move, the UK is preparing to silence dissent, for a very simple reason: tough times ahead. Guardian reported yesterday the UK might face food shortages, their young are increasingly burdened with supporting the triple lock through their taxes, and people are making exit plans rathert than be milked for their hard work.
This did not end well for freedom in Russia (see Moscow underground face recognition tech targeting dissidents). This will not end well for democracy in Europe.
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.
It's to get people used to the idea without giving enough surface area to fight it socially. Same thing happened with the body scanners at airports in the US, now with facial recognition at airports, and a number of other privacy concerns. It's a well-worn and proven playbook.
At first it's a trial, experimental. Then it's standard, but optional and with incentives to do it. Then it's standard but you can opt out and there's lots of signs to tell you how. Slowly they make it more uncomfortable to opt out, and the signs disappear, and they berate you for trying it. Eventually it is no longer legal to opt out.
Any one step is hard to fight back against without looking like a loon to people who don't care about this kind of thing, and over the course of a few years you can take people gently through a process that, had it happened suddenly, would never have succeeded due to pushback.
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.
Let's see. As I, a seemingly private citizen, do not participate in any of these "events", but find they cause my anxiety and PTSD to go completely off the rails when all I want is a low-stress way to deal with my personal needs, not repeated antagonistic interactions when these things go on (and for who knows what reason, I seem to be someone these non-peaceful people like to provoke when it is going on), it seems to my benefit to be not for things that irritate the hell out of me. I can see no case where I personally would feel comfortable with scanning of my face though, if I can help it (yes, I know it goes on). I do not feel safer with mass surveillance.
Just a guess, but I would think that a significant motivation for doing a trial is to ensure that the frog is boiled slowly.
Opposition can now be met with "it's just a trial, relax". Then you expand the trial a bit. Keep running it until the discourse moves on. And then a few years down the line, when you roll out the full system and people complain, you can counter with "these people are exaggerating their concerns, we've trialled this for yeaaars and there were very few problems!"
The obvious next step is to prevent entry if the face is covered. I'm curious to know how resistant the system is to face masks with a printed picture on the front (or indeed, the back).
Is it to ID protestors, or to ID overstayers/other immigrant offenses? Home Office just parked up outside the station waiting for every overstayer to flag instead of just questioning people on walkups?
The failure mode is incorrect detections. If the automated system says person 1 from camera 1 is the same as person 1 in camera 2, and then extrapolate out to 10,000 people and cameras, and then don't get it wrong. Because the BBC is never going to let you live it down if the person they arrested for stealing kinda sorta looks like the guy that actually did the stealing.
Jean Charles de Menezes never got as far as being arrested. The police observed him enter an Underground station, followed him onto a tube train, and put seven bullets into his head.
Or perhaps facial recognition would leave even less time for decision making.
Someone who's face resembles that of a known terrorist was detected entering the station 8 seconds ago. He's carrying a backpack and will be on a crowded platform in 37 seconds time. There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now...
Walk up and place him under arrest. He might have a bomb. He might have a trigger for it, or he might have a dead-man's switch. It might detonate and kill you along with bystanders. That's a risk you take.
Unless you know with certainty that he has a bomb and does not have a dead man's switch, you don't just take his life because you're concerned about what-ifs.
It's no different than cops killing a man because he was holding a wallet, which they imagined might be a gun (e.g. Amadou Diallo).
Police need to stop pretending that they exist within fiction, where the outcome is known by the author. Just because you're afraid of something doesn't mean it's an actual threat.
Since 2001, there's been a real uptick in confusing fear and suspicion for evidence and knowledge.
There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now...
Is the suspect black?
(I'm asking this because there is evidence suggesting current facial recognition technology is less accurate at matching faces from some demographics, including black people. Why, what did you think I meant?)
Is this still an issue though? I'm not saying it isn't an issue, but this has been widely cited for years now and I find it hard to believe something hasn't been done about that.
As an illustration of this, 100% of the detections in the trial in 2026 have been false positives. Scanning tens of thousands of faces for each deployment, they’ve had exactly one detection, which was false:
These are different problems, with different sensitivity/selectivity (and fail modes)
It's one thing to identify a person from a database, another from camera 1, then camera 2 etc. My guess is the latter has a much lower false positive rate
How would that work? Easiest way to stop protests is to block off the area of the planned protest and arrest people who try to enter it. It’s not clear to me how facial recognition on the tube would help from a practical point or view.
Also, this seems to just be a trial expanding existing time and location scoped deployments of live facial recognition into a new environment, rather than a trial run for always-on live facial recognition across the tube network.
Identify attendees and key figures from social media → pick them up when detected on public transport.
The real issue is not (just) this specific use case, rather it's the govt generally knowing where people are going and where they have historically been.
I don’t have a problem with protests, but clearly there’s no one set of laws or policies that will be agreeable to everyone. Think fox hunting, abortion, trans rights, etc. etc. There will always be protests in a representative democracy.
Facial recognition could be used to identify people who are likely to participate in protests and prevent them from doing so in advance by intercepting them at their boarding station or somewhere near it. You could also scan for persons arriving in a city where a protest might be plannend and arrest them beforehand.
As with your sibling comment, what you’re describing is theoretically possible, but it’s also more difficult and resource intensive than the simple dumb alternative of blocking off the area of the planned protest and putting some police officers outside nearby tube stations to arrest anyone who’s clearly intending to head to the protest.
It’s already easy for the police to prevent protests in a practical sense. It’s a political and legal issue more than a technical one.
What would be grounds for arresting someone at the tube stations? Is it illegal in the UK for police to believe you intend to go a certain area based on how you exit the tube?
Same grounds as for arresting them anywhere else, more or less. I am not saying that the police should ban protests (and they generally don’t). I’m just talking about the practicalities of how they could go about doing it.
It's not about grounds to arrest them, it's about practicality.
If you need to arrest someone in London (someone who might be about to cause harm) then there's a very good chance they will go through a tube station, and they tend to have relatively few, easily controlled exits. Most tube stations have two or less.
A few high profile tube stations occasionally have armed police presence.
But I think the idea that face recognition is being used to suppress protest is pretty overcooked; apart from the utter silliness around the banning of Palestine Action, we have a solid right to protest and we do.
The main problem is London has far too few police officers, and it has a transport system that is under consistent terror threat.
What do you mean by "need to arrest someone"? Would that be for someone who already committed a crime and has a warrant, or one who cops think may commit a crime in the future?
We’re talking about the practicalities of arresting protestors and whether or not face recognition on the tube would be a practical aid to police officers for this sort of purpose. Who should or shouldn’t be arrested is a separate question (and no-one here is suggesting that peaceful protestors should be arrested).
The latter is legitimate, isn't it? Do we not anticipate trying to arrest people who might be in the process of committing a terror attack, on the balance of evidence about their conduct? Or are we just going to wait?
Not to say that hasn't gone wrong (infamously and tragically, although that was largely a failure of conventional surveillance) but one key part of mass surveillance policing is arresting people who are clearly about to do a thing.
That might indeed be disruptive protest where it is illegal — for example if you know someone is intending to deface a painting or a monument, or has been planning to attend a protest to disrupt it.
I think people look at face detection policing in this context and imagine thoughtcrime, when the reality is e.g. finding a disturbed person who has been doing a dry run on pushing a stranger off a tube train platform (a real problem that seems to happen every couple of years), catching someone who has been reported sexually assaulting fellow passengers or who has violently assaulted another passenger or someone above ground (a regular problem), trying to disrupt county-lines drug distribution etc. (absolutely constant), or, heaven help us, finding someone who has been spotted at a national railway station with someone on terror watchlists who has then disappeared into the underground.
London Underground isn't a thing that can be effectively managed with ordinary policing. It has 272 stations, over 70 in central London alone. During rush hour there are up to half a million people in that system at any one time. Tube exits are choke points.
We're not talking about some notion of thoughtcrime here.
We're talking about preparation, and the equivalent of reasonable suspicion for a stop or probable cause for an arrest in the USA, where people absolutely are arrested every day for things an officer has seen enough evidence to believe are about to happen.
Whenever someone suggests it's OK for the police to arrest people for future crime they haven't committed I feel the need to point out that the police do not always act in the public interest. Individuals abuse their powers.
e.g. when they do things like holding illegal employment blacklist[1][2][3] of innocent people.
I don't want to live in a country where, for example, the police can punish you just because they don't like trade unions.
What's I find ironic is that all this police state bullshit never seems to actually deal with antisocial behaviour or low level crime, it's always for political infractions.
We have more CCTV in London than almost anywhere else on the planet and you still get harassed outside tube stations by organised gangs of soliciting very forcefully for "charity" collections.
I don't know English law, and I'm american so I have a bent towards protecting freedoms. That said, no I don't see it as necessary to arrest someone before they do anything wrong.
There's a gray area for sure, and in the US you can, for example, be charged with conspiracy to commit murder without actually getting to that end goal. I'm always uncomfortable with how a court decides to allow a trial in such a case, though if someone has actively been surveiling their target, collecting materials or weapons, and ideally documenting their intentions somehow then I do understand why most would consider that itself punishable.
If a person without a warrant gets off the tube and walks in a general direction of a protest, I wouldn't see any grounds for arrest. I'm sure there's still gray area there, say they're carrying smoke grenades or flash bangs or something - though in that case I'd assume the potential crime is possessing those items rather than walking in a direction.
> If a person without a warrant gets off the tube and walks in a general direction of a protest, I wouldn't see any grounds for arrest.
The police don't manage mass protests this way either. If they want to stop you joining a disruptive protest they just cordon off streets, close tube exits, stand in the way and tell you to turn back.
But severely disruptive micro-protests are now a significant problem in London; I am quite relaxed about the idea that someone known to be planning to seriously disrupt might get tracked to their destination, and I suspect so are they, or they aren't very serious about it.
I think people from the USA really misunderstand how policing works here. When we say we are "policed by consent" it is taken pretty seriously.
Back when I was a student, this idea of facial recognition was only a glimmer of possibility and the idea of all of this would have got my freedom fighter hackles up.
But if you've ever been in a tube station, one of the deep lines, when they've had to close exits and you're one of thousands of people who need to get out, you realise that these are high-pressure environments where even British reserve and fairness begin to fray. They are very vulnerable places. So I look at this plan and I am like… nope, doesn't bother me. Getting in and getting out at rush hour bothers me.
I am not without my concerns about the mobile recognition vans; I think there is a risk that they have a chilling effect on gatherings that is disproportionate. I dislike that concept in much the same way that I dislike our regional police force's tendency to get the helicopter out when a bit more road policing might do the job.
But inside the tube? Nope, facial recognition seems like a pretty worthwhile tool, not least because it could be so efficiently deployed.
They are prepared to arrest 90 year old protestors at Palestinian matches for Israel, they won't stop until all critism of that illegal state is silenced.
It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.
If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.
Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.
The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.
Putting it kindly, this is an incredibly optimistic interpretation of how historically the government and police have used their powers. There is a long and consistent history of UK police abusing powers, stretching legal definitions and using technology to target those outside the original mandate of a law or investigation.
Antiterrorism and anti-disorder laws sold to the public as needed to prevent serious threats have been used extensively outside of what I think most would consider reasonable to surveil people, restrict freedoms and harass. The prime example are the stop and search laws, used to search a large numbers of people, predominantly based on racial stereotype, with zero impact on terrorism.
Remember that the Met police is known to be institutionally racist & sexist. It is not an organisation to be trusted.
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.
Google can block access to your Google account, which is enormously disruptive for many people whose online lives are built around it. In some ways it could be more disruptive in the long term than an arrest.
I mean, quite a lot of people want that or think they want it in many Western societies. They want the police to be able to find criminals, they want their kids kept off social media, they want terrorists' comms to be intercepted, they want 'immigrants' to not be able to claim benefits, they want voters to be required to produce ID, they want all manner of joined-up information state capabilities and they don't give a shit if they're surveilled and caught up in it until/unless it bites them in the ass.
And the thing is that they're not necessarily wrong to want some of those things, but they don't understand or don't care about collateral damage or what you might perceive as a lack of freedom. So they will happily vote for it.
Democracies vote to shoot themselves in the foot all the time. Look around you.
> In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination.
By "may harm your defence" what is meant is that Miranda was modified to inform people who are arrested that magistrates and juries are fully allowed to infer that you might be seeking to mislead the court if you didn't tell the police something significant that you later rely on as a defence in court. You're still allowed to do it, and they are allowed to conclude it is sketchy. That's the point of the modification.
Juries do and did this anyway.
The modified Miranda doesn't say you have no right against self-incrimination; it now warns you that if something is crucial to your defence it might be in your interest to mention it so the jury doesn't think you are trying to shine them on.
It's important to understand that this happens in the context of a country that does not have a plea bargaining mechanism. Cases go to court if it is in the public interest that they do (and the police don't decide this). But you can still no-comment your way through an interview and you aren't going to be bullied by a prosecutor into accepting a plea deal.
Of course but that is not really what I am asserting; I was just responding to an American in terms that are understood.
UK suspects on arrest are, nevertheless, read their rights in what is colloquially understood here as a "Miranda warning". It's my understanding that "Miranda rights" are a sort of colloquial shorthand in lots of countries, because we all see US crime procedurals.
(It's actually called "The Caution", and US Miranda rights were inspired by an earlier version, though AFAIR we borrowed back some changes that were influenced by the Miranda wording, before the contentious modification about "may harm your defence")
The subsequent "they modified Miranda" fuss made quite a bit of international news when it was introduced, with Americans sniping at us about changing it, arguing we'd taken away the right not to self-incriminate, etc., that we'd sullied the grand tradition of English Common Law, all that rather ironic snarking from the country that pioneered the abusive plea bargain system.
The Caution read at arrest is actually shorter in the UK; it doesn't mention that the cautioned have a right to an attorney or one will be appointed for them. They do, but the duty sergeant at the police station tells them that when they are booked.
You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
The only realistic protection here is a “decoy” partition, a partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS. That gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.
> You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
Again, no, not just "in an investigation".
It has to be an investigation that has reached the point where they have gone to a judge and got permission to serve written notice. The judge will ask them if there is a necessary and proportionate reason. There is then a timeframe in which you have to respond.
Police can't simply demand your PIN and charge you if you don't comply.
It doesn't make it OK if a judge says you have to incriminate yourself or face jail time for not doing so. So either way you're screwed if it gets to that.
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.
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.
Like 10 years ago I realized that facial recognition research was basically on the same level as weapons research, if not worse. So many nefarious usages.
Every researcher and product designer who leaned into this just has helped speedrun the world into a nasty place. But I guess I don’t have to type my passcode into my phone anymore!
Humans learned a lot. They learned some ways that don't work. That's why Germany learned to be more subtle, UK learned it needs more surveillance, France learned to ban face coverings, not Muslims, and USA learned how to properly stack the courts.
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.
> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available and images of anyone not on the authorised database will be deleted immediately and permanently.
So, massive invasion of privacy, but will only catch stupid criminals (and unsuspecting people who happen to have a strong resemblance with a criminal in the database?).
Even if this initiative is effective at reducing crime, I don't want to lose privacy or see a chilling effect in society where people are afraid because they know they're being watched.
But most of it, the overwhelming majority, comprises standalone installations at best networked into a corporate HQ but most commonly just recorded on site.
It's not like in police drama programmes where they can switch from the camera in the Tube station to the one in the newsagent outside for seamless real-time tracking.
Yes, the "Big Scary Numbers" listing CCTV cameras per capita include private cameras, which can outnumber "public" (government, council and police) cameras by orders of magnitude. In the UK these include those owned by businesses and individuals, even things like ring doorbells cameras. There's no real equivalent numbers including that I can find for the USA. In 2024 there were some 16 thousand council operated cameras in London total [0] - well below the ~700k often touted including private cameras.
If you restrict it to just those public cameras, London would barely be in the top 10 of USA cities in public cameras per capita.
Sure, it's not good, but implicit in many comments here is "I'm glad it's not that bad here" (presumably the USA for most commentors), but in reality it is happening "here", has been happening "here" for some time, and in many ways is already much worse "here" already.
While I think many of the UK's actions around this are massive mistake, certainly don't read me as supporting it, at least understand that the big headlines and pointing away from home towards "Orwellian UK" is a misleading distraction.
“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.
The driving in Portugal is notoriously bad, yeah maybe not such a concern in your tourist experience in Lisbon center, because you can't really go fast. Get out on the motorways and country roads and your opinion will soon change.
Recording everything has a lot of upsides. Unfortunately, downsides for privacy and democracy are very real.
Talking about speeding, not sure. I am driving around Lisbon and speed limit is 50 in city, and lots of speed cameras. Though I am driving at 55 as limit and rarely see anyone going faster than that.
You are in a new country and feel that your kid needs protection, which is perfectly human, but does mean that your opinion is a bit biased.
As sibling comments mention, countries exist with many cameras, public or private, where driving feels worse. I didn't look at road deaths, but I'd be surprised if Portugal is among the leading countries on this.
Equally, if you take a bit of distance, you can realise that Portugal has many other parents living there, yet they are not clamouring for more surveillance: it's difficult to imagine that the Portuguese dictatorial government is evilly preventing its people from accessing the benefits of surveillance.
private citizens should be allowed to record anything. make it strictly forbidden for the government and businesses because they have the power and motivation to abuse it, but that risk doesnt really exist for an ordinary person.
Maybe they should. But I think there is a correlation between "private citizens can't record other citizens" and "almost no cameras around". Coming from a country with a lots of cameras (where people record each other as well), this is a very comforting feeling.
I love the word "including" there. Yes it will be used for people suspected of minor crimes but it also includes people accused serious crimes as well!
This sentence struck me as well. It says what it is focused on, but nothing about what it actually captures.
What I would like to see is something like this:
- The detectors have a per-determined list of suspect faces and only record information when those faces are spotted.
- These detectors keep only a fixed length of recording that is permanently deleted unless it is actively linked to a crime and explicitly held as part of that investigation.
But it says nothing concrete. Just some nonsense about "focus" which doesn't mean anything.
Well, no, this is a group of people who police are actively looking to arrest because they believe they've committed a crime. That's a different thing.
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.
I don't mind it. I work in the same field and people don't want to work in government institutions anymore, there are less and less kids in police/military schools. Cameras allow officers to stop patrolling and do more preventive work, focus on hard cases, etc. In a relative small city we manage 500+ cameras and more are added every day. The problem is storage and finding people to monitor them.
My only issue is getting it in hands of some crazy dictator, but that is another story.
> My only issue is getting it in hands of some crazy dictator, but that is another story.
That IS the story though. The kind of offences these cameras disuade pale in comparison with the risk of abuse of power infringed in the 99.999% of innocent people these cameras are pointed at suppose.
Most people don't grok the built-in threat. They only realize when inevitably they are in deep shit already, then all the 'how could we have known' empty phrases come to surface.
Every society gets what they deserve at the end (which doesn't mean every individual, thats why its optimal to live in society that has similar core values and moral 'height' to not be constantly depressed from fellow citizens and their decisions ie in voting).
Maintaining freedom requires continuous effort that can be unpleasant, not giving up privacies 1 by 1 to get deep into / maintain undisturbed comfort zone. Laziness is one way to kill freedom.
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]
You’ve been drinking the propaganda again. Most cases don’t make it to court. The courts lean towards trusting the police. The police lean towards perjury.
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.
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:
This does not answer my original question: why doesn't Britain give the north of Ireland back to the Irish? Why does it cling to it? Didn't Britain cause enough suffering for the Irish already?
Because (depending on the exact poll) either a majority of plurality of the people of Northern Ireland favor remaining in the UK, so it’s not that simple politically. The Good Friday Agreement has provisions for a change in the future status of Northern Ireland based on a referendum, so if/when a majority of its population want to join the Republic of Ireland, this can happen.
Northern Ireland receives heavy subsidies from the UK government. I imagine the UK would be quite happy to cede it to the Republic of Ireland were this politically feasible and not likely to kick off another round of sectarian violence. Ireland may want the six counties in principle, but might be a little unhappy with the bill.
And they have been out for about 100 years. The problematic issue is the status of Northern Ireland, where a slim majority, or clear plurality, still favor remaining in the UK. The idea that everyone would be happy if “the Brits” just “left” Northern Ireland is incredibly naive. The Good Friday agreement already provides for the possibility of referenda on the future status of Northern Ireland. The suggestion that a sudden unilateral decision to cede Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland would reduce conflict and sectarian violence (which have already been very successfully reduced by the painstakingly negotiated GFA) is essentially too silly to even comment on.
The UK has encryption bans(backdoor on demand), VPN/Tor/I2P restrictions (illegal to advertise as bypasses), age/ID verification for websites and social media, age/ID verification for devices & app stores, key disclosure laws, mandatory mass metadata retention laws, and Google and Apple account required for online identity verification.
The US has none of those laws at the federal level.
> 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.
Where are you getting the perception that Americans generally fear London?
I don't know a single American that has ever expressed any sentiment that London is unsafe. I know a few that have some stupid notions about immigrants in the UK, but that isn't exclusive to people on this side of the pond.
Genuinely, though. Americans just don't worry about safety in London outside of scams and petty crime inherent to any big tourist city.
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.
TBH wrapped baseball bat is still a baseball bat, just because it's wrapped it doesn't mean you can't use it plus the beginning of the video was missing and it was clearly during some protest
but I agree being stabbed should be legal for victim /s
It was not during some protest, many people of all colors nearby supported the person being arrested and told the policeman he's doing a stupid mistake.
Worse is that it's one of a long run of infuriating police state blunders (to put it mildly).
I've often wondered what would happen if you took some near IR, eye safe, ultra bright LEDs and strobed them at 60 Hz from your headgear in an omnidirectional fashion, pointing away from your body and avoiding nearby floor reflections. You'd stick out like a sore thumb (which I wouldn't mind, as I'm not a criminal nor doing anything wrong!) but it would be enough to likely "opt out" of facial recognition via dint of blinding the camera in the vicinity of your face.
Britain has all sorts of laws like "attempting to pervert the course of justice", so you'd have to be very careful to not accidentally cover for a "real criminal", but just to preserve privacy it might work (especially if more than one person did so).
I've never had the guts to do it, but I do really hate facial recognition and all of this surveillance capitalism.
All that would be left is gait and biometric analysis, as well as any electronic signalling coming from the tracking device everyone carries in their pocket.
I have it on good authority they have been doing this for years, maybe this is just an increase to inside the station or maybe just a good time to normalise this…
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.
They might talk about it, but gambling is a huge industry in the US and many different types of gambling are possible and have been for decades/centuries. It is far less restrictive than many other major countries on gambling I would say e.g. US, China, Australia etc.
The US pays lip service to some major freedoms but I think the reality is far from that. US police crack down violently on protests and have for a long time. Their police are far more violent and vindictive in general. Several states have porn bans. Fireworks are restricted heavily in many places. You can buy a house and end up with a random group of locals controlling what you can and can't do with it. You're looking at it through rose tinted glasses.
On top of that, a lot of the larger restrictions we have are borne out of the USA. The war on drugs. The consequences, and subsequent security restrictions we have, thanks to their 'war on terror'.
Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?
Comments here seem like an ideological kneejerk response.
You assume it will be used in good faith which is charitable. It doesn't even need to take an authoritarian regime to pervert this technology. Abusive police officers in the US for example use Flock to stalk ex girlfriends.
Yes I'm sure their police force is entirely free of any psychological problems and in no way selects for people who might be incline to abuse their position of authority.
> The report looked at police training requirements in more than 100 countries and found that the US had among the lowest, in terms of average hours required.
> Also, many other countries require officers to have a university degree - or equivalent - before joining the police, but in the US most forces just require the equivalent of a high-school diploma.
honestly, i've found that it's usually better to not engage in these threads. the likelihood of a good faith discussion is very low. as you point out, it's mostly ideological kneejerk reactions rather than actual discussion based on considered viewpoints. but i'll give it a go.
i personally don't like this for a few reasons. possibility of data leaks, ick factor via my built-in paranoia around being watched/recorded, possibility of false positives etc. but i have some faith in TfL / BTP to not piss about in an egregious way. we have pretty decent checks and balances these days for UK police compared to the past and definitely compared to some police forces in the states. i'm also aware that as a man i tend to not experience the same shit that a lot of women have to deal with on a daily basis.
so i might be willing to accept it as part of a necessary trade-off based on my real life experiences on the tube. i'd probably be willing to accept having my face recorded/pattern matched when using the tube if it either stops or helps to prosecute a sexual assault.
there is definitely a difference between liking something and accepting it.
> 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?
Literally all normal people on the tube already pay with bank card or Apple Pay and are thus trackable anyway. This just levels the playing field for the barrier pushers.
The “main character” syndrome is strong here .. thing is, most people wouldn’t even be the main character in a movie about their own lives .. also if this helps catch criminals/terrorists/thieves .. what’s the actual harm to an innocent passenger ..
I don't see how this is any different from how traffic cameras are used. Hot take, but as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal.
At first this made me upset - why should I be monitored?
Then it hit me, years ago we had policemen/bobbies that would essentially do the same thing. Look at people - notice them.
It’s a shame they didn't launch this as bobbie v2 that would offer people useful services (like the one wearing a funny hat did): a way to alert police, information, directions. Heck it could even offer guidance for those in need to talk to someone. Truly a missed opportunity.
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.
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...
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.
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.
To be honest I don't see the point. Anyone committing a crime goes around in a balaclava these days so facial recognition won't be much use. They'd have much more success just banning face coverings and there would be plenty of support for it.
The problems we have are much deeper though. Petty crime is out of control and it's impacting society in obvious ways. Just go to a shop to see the measures they have to take to try to reduce theft. We don't have enough police due to a decade or two of underfunding. And even if we did we don't have enough prison space to even let harder criminals finish out their sentences - so what's the point in arresting petty criminals?
Saying that London is still one of the safest major cities in the world. Safer than any major US city. I've been living here a long time and the worst I've seen is a few phone thefts. I can walk pretty much anywhere safely at any time of the day or night. Don't let the fear mongering online fool you.
The way things keep devolving in Britain, the easiest path is to force everyone to wear a camera on their chest like the police do. Then you can arrest people who don't wear them because surely they have something to hide.
Why would they need to do anything so explicit and crude? Everyone carries a smartphone on them at every waking moment and they chose to do it willingly (though unwitting of the implications for personal privacy). They are also ready to use them for surveillance almost on a hair-trigger impulse these days. Thankfully this works against state services almost as much as it works against the public, as channels like Crimebodge are able to show us. But the point is that the state already knows what these devices represent to them in terms of data collection, and are subtle enough to avoid making this a mandatory situation... For now.
To provide clarity, this isn't (yet) (publicly) hooked up to the whole CCTV network of London Underground stations. Instead they use these temporary portable stations you can see at the end of the linked article.
I went to Victoria station where they were doing this yesterday and the police seemed quite unhappy with me taking photos of them operating the facial recognition station and confronted me almost immediately. The irony...
The area they were doing it in was completely swarming with far more police officers than usual, supposedly to "provide information".
I had expected to see signs all around the station warning passengers that this trial was taking place, but the only ones I saw were directly in that area or by the stairs as you're walking down into it. They weren't small enough that I could characterise them as intentionally hard-to-miss, but I reckon with the amount of traffic going down that staircase, the overwhelming majority of people would not have actually been aware that they were being subject to this LFR trial. I didn't see a single person other than myself pausing to read the signs.
Edit: There also wasn't a single sign inside the gateline where you'd tap out and walk into the area that the camera station was pointing at. I asked the police why this was, and they claimed it was because the cameras are only positioned to capture people entering the station, not exiting. Maybe that's true, as long as you don't turn around at any point? I'm not convinced.
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.
Yes but also no.
On the one hand, yes: the UK is demonstrably "this is fine" when it comes to mass surveillance.
On the other: the government is almost pathologically bad at joined-up thinking.
To illustrate the latter: I have been sent exactly one speeding ticket. It was for a car I had sold 6 months previous to the offence. The police force was somehow unaware of this.
To add: same happened in russia around 2018 on a couple of subway stations in St.-Pete and in moscow at first
the result? faster tracking and arrests of people for checks who were deemed too problematic + (i.e. with anti-war protests in 2022) the cameras were used to track or threat tracking almost everyone who protested, and lowering the load on the police by coming to the dwellings afterwards in the next several days or even weeks without the need to do it there and then
in 2018-2021 it was still possible to overwhelm the holding capacity of jails in major cities, but after mass tracking it more or less became obsolete
It's worth pointing out this is specifically not mass tracking. LFR scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.
To continue GP’s point, in Moscow a “database of outstanding wanted suspects” was enough to get a well-known science writer[1] who publicly expressed her opposition to the war systematically harrassed by the police because she (a then-pregnant woman) matched a database record for, I kid you not, a draft evader. Reportedly some of the officers even admitted the absurdity[2] of the situation but, well, computer says detain.
[1] Asya Kazantseva
[2] Women can be subject to the draft if they’re doctors, radio engineers, or one of a handful of other professions, but thus far it’s very uncommon and either way not applicable in her case.
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
I have some sympathy for this as shoplifting is getting worse. Also, an acquaintance of mine works as a security guard at a Tesco and was attacked and injured with a syringe earlier this year, luckily he's ok but they haven't caught the attacker. The cameras at the time did not have facial recognition, though I can't judge if that would have made a difference.
Thieves might ignore checkout completely, but there are also cameras capturing everyone entering and leaving the shop.
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Just want to add, the overhead cameras at checkout are pointed straight down and can read your phone password as you put it in to pull up Apple Pay.
Don't 99% of people just use face or fingerprint unlocking?
That's besides the point. It's still a massive intrusion of privacy.
It's like a stranger looking over your shoulder, and you can't even tell it to bounce.
I wonder, if police wanted to search your phone, can they unlock with your fingerprint against your will?
No, in the UK they can't just take your finger and press it to your phone or point it at your face to unlock it. They can service you a notice demanding access to your phone, and not providing access is a crime.
In most countries they can. Which is why you should (in a perfect world) have password or fingerprint unlock, and if you use the fingerprint, the phone wipes itself. Not even Graphene supports this.
Yes.
I wish that Apple would make a way to require both FaceID and a passcode. This seems like an easy option to add.
Something you have + Something you know. SOP.
GrapheneOS has Touch ID and a passcode as an option.
And what happens when your Touch ID stops working I find biometrics to be quite fragile.
You still have a separate password that authenticates you without biometrics.
The touch + passcode is nice because even if someone watches you enter your passcode it won't matter unless they can spoof the fingerprint reader too, which is highly unlikely. And you can use a much shorter passcode for convenience.
Wash your hands? /s
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.
Though this is true, many supermarkets use this as a scare tactic instead of surveillance. I know a few people who work in supermarkets and when when incidents happen they can't use footage from the self-checkouts because they're not recording.
I do wonder if the cameras exist in the machines so one day they can be recording and performing face recognition however.
Reminds me of a story I read long ago. (And Snowden's point that even if the current government uses such powers responsibly, a future government may not be so kind...)
---
R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?
D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.
If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.
R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...
D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.
R.E: Could I get some food?
D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,
"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopo...
This describes Germany.
> Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.
Its still just about possible in rural areas as long you dont go into cities or on motorways.
When they outlaw cash that will be the nail in the coffin.
Documenting birth is legally required since the 1800s and gets sent to a national index. The state will have a name associated with them since birth making them unable to be anonymous.
So that you cannot avoid paying taxes and going to the war when the government decides so.
Oyster is still anonymous, in the sense that no details are required to buy a card, and it can be topped up using cash. The cards can be returned or disposed of as necessary. But as you say, it knows your movements at least in so far as your entry and exit point in the system, with a timestamp, though you can use a separate card for each if you don't mind paying the full fare that gets charged when a journey is 'incomplete'. The barriers also still currently accept paper tickets, but for how long will be anyone's guess. I would assume that as Travelcards can be tied to paper National Rail tickets, it will still be some time until that goes away. I see a lot more people using eTickets these days, and trains even have adverts now reminding people to keep their phones charged to be able to show their ticket to inspectors.
I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.
As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been finessed into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.
Self-checkout at the grocery store is a major vector for shoplifting. That's why the cameras are there.
If I was running such a store, I wouldn't want to spend the money on those cameras. But alas, the money is well spent in stopping thieves.
I was talking to one of the staff in a grocery store a while ago. He said the corporate auditors came in one day and decided to review the security cams. The result was half the staff was fired for theft.
It's just too bad that we live in a low trust society.
Not only there are cameras, but the machines typically accept only cards and not cash (except for one supermarket chain in my city) so I never use self-checkout.
But the cameras on the UK self-checkouts only point at your face. How does that stop anything other than casual opportunistic theft of low value items by inculcating some kind of pre-crime guilt feeling? Professional shoplifters (if that isn't an oxymoron) have much more subtle means to carry out their trade, or not as the case may be, depending on their target, usually carried out long before they reach any kind of till.
THe one of the face is to ID you, and the one in the barcode area is to work out if you've slapped a sticker for 1kg potatoes on a packet of 1kg of meat.
The face one is to show you that you're on camera, the other one is to detect the fruad. THe cameras in the ceiling aren't high enough resolution to work out if your doing a switcheroo or not.
Basically its a full service package. with the three cameras, it makes it very hard to argue that it wasn't you who did it, that the swap of barcode was a simple error, and that it was just a mistake.
> But the cameras on the UK self-checkouts only point at your face
Only the one that's shown on the screen. There are other cameras, including ones in the ceiling that look at the entire machine.
The cameras here are in the ceiling, and they watch to see if you are scanning the merchandise before putting it in the bag. I presume they are AI-trained to catch this.
I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.
>I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.
A likely excuse!!
Fortunately, I am a regular customer and they know me.
They definitely know you are a regular customer. Their tracking database says you come here often.
Of course they know you, they wrote the system with your tools ;-P
Hmm, not sure D is so heavily used anymore. Still mad respect to Walter!
Happens often from what I remember reading and most grocery stores account for the loss. Definitely lots of accidents as well.
There are almost certainly more cameras to catch the stealing on tape too. But when the camera or even a person sees you swipe something, they are gonna want to have a pic of your face to be able to know who you are, especially so they can recognize repeat offenders. Next time you show up, they might be looking for their most notorious thieves so they can call police, point to you and hand them a video of the last time you stole.
These businesses chose lower staffing costs knowing full well the price would be higher theft.
So maybe the problem is that you shouldn’t have self checkout if you cannot do it without immediately being stolen from?
The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier.
This is why I use the human-run checkout lines. I want to keep the humans employed.
Our high standard of living is due to machines doing the work rather than humans.
Not all machines lead to increase in the standard of living, and many things that would improve the standard of living are not done. At some point the argument you have made becomes irrelevant and cliched.
> Not all machines lead to increase in the standard of living
I did not say "all" machines. If I had meant "all" I would have written "all". That's what the word "all" is for.
Consider: "people like ice cream" Riposte: "not everybody likes ice cream"
I see this kind of response over and over here. It's cliched and irrelevant.
It was implied. Why else would you use that argument in responding to ridgeguy's comment about using human-run checkout lines? What machines would you point to as making the world worse?
In any case, since it bothers you so, you explained the situation yourself: "The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier."
It's an error to equate "cheaper" to "increase in standard of living" because the people benefiting from the reduction in cost are usually not the entirety of the community, and it's unfortunate that someone of your caliber accepts such lazy thinking.
Over the last twenty years, automation has increased but the standard of living has gotten worse.
You both miss the crux of the argument, i think. It would be more precise to say that physical machines raise the standard of living that we measure, but abstract machines reduce that which we don't measure. (Viz, finance.)
Compared to a generation ago, we can stuff more crap in our pockets and wardrobes, but housing is precarious and public institutions are weaker. Good luck supporting a family on a bottom-quartile wage.
GDP, measures of inflation: Goodhart's law.
All fine and dandy, but in the case of self-checkouts the cashier work is done by myself, and I'm not a machine.
I scan and bag while I shop, so self-checkout is just paying. It's barely a shift of work from cashier to me, because I have to pick things up and place them in my bag/basket/trolley anyway, scanning them as I do is barely an increase in work.
Humans are still doing the work, except now it’s you instead of someone earning a wage. You do it for free!
Part of our high standard of living relies on living in a high trust society, which self checkouts seem to erode.
I highly doubt that story as camera footage is audited remotely (the store staff know nothing about it), and half the staff is way too high (to not be detected on the ground).
I wouldn't be surprised at half. If a worker sees others at the store stealing without consequence, they may be tempted to steal as well.
BTW, the cash register was invented because of rampant theft by the cashiers.
I know this is the standard response, but it doesn't make sense. If you're going to steal something, why would you expose it at the checkout? Wouldn't you just not bring it out at that point? It's the same for the really annoying scales that some supermarkets insist on that weigh every item you as you pack it, which makes packing really hard.
The whole thing feels like post hoc justification for bad design (or bad understanding of the usage).
I think the idea is that you'll go to the check out with several items and only present some of them and then skip the one that is expensive. If you just walk out of the store several times with items you haven't paid for, they might catch and ban you immediately.
The savings that a store has from self checkouts far outweigh the shoplifting it attracts. I don’t see what the cameras add. Do stores review camera footage at the end of the day and then hunt down the offenders?
They can catch legitimate mistakes. I had this happen about a week ago. I scanned something, thought I heard the beep, then put it in the bag. It stopped me and replayed the video. I looked at the item list and sure enough, it didn't scan. It was an honest mistake, and the camera caught it. I rescanned it after the attendant cleared the error.
I've also had it flag when it thinks there is more stuff in my cart when going to pay. This happened to me when I had an umbrella in my cart. The attendant had to come over and clear it. When I worked at a grocery store 20+ years ago, checking that there was nothing on the bottom of the cart was a big thing for cashiers; the cameras seem to automate this check at self-checkout.
I've also had if false flag when I pass my hand over in a way that looks questionable, where the attendant has to come review the video and clear it.
All this stuff happens in real-time during the checkout process.
For people who want to steal, they seem to find ways around it. I was at the store a couple months ago (the same one that has all the tech mentioned above) and the beep next to me sounded ever so slightly off. I looked over, the guy was on the payment screen, which I'm assuming disables a lot of the camera checks, and was passing all his items over the scanner and making the beep noise with his mouth. The tone wasn't perfect, but it was really close.
I didn’t know the cameras did that! Very dystopian. Smart that the guy found a bypass.
Primarily used to catch and ban from the shop heavy repeat offenders, some people shop lift on order and resell items versus use them for them selves, or have addiction problems with alcoholism etc.
There's usually one person in charge of an array of self-checkouts, and the self-checkouts flag suspicious activity.
> I don’t see what the cameras add.
Again, stores would not spend money on self-checkouts and cameras if they didn't pay off.
So all the customer has to do is shoplift the item before the self checkout.
Yes, I've seen the videos on X of plenty of people doing just that. Then people complain that the stores close down.
In the Seattle area, the cities are trying to stop grocery stores from shutting down.
Retail groups had to retract claims of organized shoplifting:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...
They just dirty the airwaves with whatever lies they want to justify spying. Drag them to court where they have to be honest and well, their BS is revealed.
The low trust side is entirely on the rich owners class side of the divide.
Academics and credentialed class take some blame here too; of course no one is going to be capable of a task or job without their coursework. Nevermind expertise in $thing been around since before their class
Capitalism has turned everyone into a fucking Udemy sales pitch.
Only 30% of people have seen a mental health professional since 2020. Everyone else does what we used to do; rather than pay a modern day preacher for faith healing[1] we have friends.
[1] lots of people truly need intervention but America uses therapy to cope with basic shit https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
My local coop (I will not share the articles, because doxing) caught someone trying to smuggle >£300 of stuff out of the store. its a tiny store, maybe medium cornershop sized.
at the start of the year, I personally saw 4 shop liftings happen. I know the staff well, they told me after one of the events that at the present rate they are loosing something like £1500 a week.
They now have a security guard, which has lowered the problem, but not stopped it.
Maybe not organised like the mafia but you 100% get crackheads shoplifting in an organised fashion to get money for drugs in London, and self checkouts obviously make this easier.
Not unheard of to get crackheads trying to sell you stolen supermarket meat out of a bag if you hang around in some of the less salubrious pubs
Do you even have crackheads in London? I was familiar with "crackhead" only as an American concept.
Yes actual crack is pretty popular among that demographic, the UK has a very good relatively low cost supply of cocaine.
The classic combo is Afghan buj + crack but synthetic opioids are starting to make an appearance now the CIA isn’t producing heroin anymore.
It’s nowhere near as bad as the west coast of the US obviously, that’s a whole other level.
I would normally use a different word than crackhead but I thought I’d use the internationally recognised term
Interesting. I always thought it was opioids that were the main problem in Europe.
No, it's metric. Our schools are flooded with 30cm rulers. You'll see kids as young as 8 with 330ml drinks. Some even count in decimal - there is no end in sight
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...
Yep. Much like shopper cards and browser fingerprinting, it doesn’t take much to de-anonymize the data using the intersection of items.
Yes, but as I said it is possible to use a separate ID for entry and exit, so unless they were willing to perform a CCTV trawl then your entire journey could not be assessed. The penalty for this kind of anonymity is paying top fare for entry and exit, so only a very rich tube user could bear the cost. The thing that got people to use Oyster in the first place was 'discounted' prices, as in they bumped the price for a paper ticket when Oyster cards were introduced and kept the old prices for Oyster only journeys. Make of that what you will. Paper tickets are still available as of 2026 last time I checked.
There was a similar data trawl when Boris bikes were introduced, and some of the information gleaned from that was quite hilarious but I can't find a link because it was from the old world and now lost in enshitted search.
I think the point with those supermarket cameras is to influence behaviour, not to surveil, I doubt they are even recording. When I was a kid (maybe in a worse area than you) there were CRT TVs by entrances of supermarkets showing a live feed of you walking in. People behave differently when they feel they are being watched, it's why they have creepy CCTV posters with big eyes on them. Probably the same reason for evil eye charms too.
Yes, this has been under consideration when thinking just how much raw footage would have to be stored for 4 or more self-checkout cameras for every shop. Probably multiple terabytes per day, per chain, just for London. There is also the classic 'plastic camera with blinking LED' CCTV installation, intended to deter theft in a more lo-fi manner.
As an aside, the artist John Baldessari made an installation in the Tate Modern where you were filmed walking into a room and the image was projected on the wall, but with about a 10 second delay, so that the feedback loop between seeing yourself 'on screen' and being able to influence it was completely broken. It was quite interesting to experience.
Terabytes for an entire chain isn't that much, actually?
Here's a good reference point: if you have one hard drive per camera, and record at 1Mbps, you can store 5 years of footage.
About 8 or 9 years ago I saw a self checkout pos provider demo a camera/screen system that would do basic images processing constantly to try and take pictures when people are clearly visible. A couple of low res, low colour palette, cropped images per user are much much easier to store. This was at a security conference.
Fair enough, sounds like a reasonable compromise, but I still question the entire premise of having these cameras in the first place, especially since they do not film the area where items are being handled. Tallying a loss of stock to a specific person would seem to be really quite difficult to do with only a set of photographs of the faces of everyone who utilised the self-checkouts within a certain period.
Which is again, a fair question with a reasonable answer:
Stores have loss 'prevention' (more like tracking) software which the security team can use. They are able to attach images of people stealing, but its hard to identify a person from a camera 15ft away when they are bent over a shelf; so they attach images of them stealing and of them passing through choke points - e.g. checkouts and entrances.
Tying them together is laborious, and is currently in its own little model rush - it's a technique called re-identification.
However, the next question is why doesn't it happen in practice? Well the stores have found police to be uniquely annoying on that they won't arrest and the state won't prosecute despite clear evidence.
You only need 3-5 fps SD video and with motion sensing you only record when there is a customer at the self-checkout. Technically, it is absolutely doable.
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?
If I wanted to steal something, surely I'd do it before getting to the self checkout counter.
Primary theft at them is where you scan N cheap items and just bag Y expensive item without scan and walk out, plausible deniability/psychology at play, a lot less deniability if you shove a whisky bottle down your trousers.
In Spanish supermarkets, it's tins of shellfish in the anti-theft boxes. In English ones, it's razor blades and menstrual pads. Spirits are often tagged in both countries, but not as consistently as the mejillones and the tampons.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Your ISP doesn't even know your web history outside of the domain name if they use SNI sniffing for content blocking.
> Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.
I don't see the problem on this one. Roads are owned by the government.
> Roads are owned by the government.
Roads are owned by the people. The government (should) be the servants of the interests of the people.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
How so? I'm with AAISP and I'd be very surprised if they were doing this. What are you referring to here?
Good choice, but most other people are using capitalismslop ISPs that maximize value extraction. I hear prices are a bit higher at A&A.
Yeah bit dearer but it's only ~£55 a month and feels like money well spent. They're an awesome company
Are police forces faster to solve or avoid crimes due to surveillance at least ?
I wrote in another comment but basically yes. Also they can focus on other cases that require physical presence. No need to patrol the entire subway, put 100 police officers to just patrol, every station when you can have 2-3 guys watch the cameras and just 2-3 patrols ready for intervention.
Faster to solve, but by not patrolling haven't they given up on detterence?
Surely the deterrent is the possibility of being caught?
If you're more likely to be caught due to the surveillance, logic would dictate that it's the greater deterrent.
My brother had his window smashed and bag stolen under a cctv camera in London. The police never even investigated.
I would hazard to say that wouldn't have happened had a police officer been stood there instead.
Some major shops in the UK have photographs of police officers on the door, because it reduces theft!
I think this says more about dwindling police budgets than about the efficacy of surveillance or bobbies on the beat.
No government or enforcement agency will ever say no to more power.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state
I have no idea what you are referring to here but that is most certainly not the case in most democratic countries. Where common carrier or telecom immunity is a thing they do not want to know more than they are legally obliged to know.
> but that is most certainly not the case
Indeed, this is not the case in the UK. Its too fucking expensive, and the paper work to approve that is too fucking hard. Most of the time the state will request search logs from google instead. its far cheaper and much higher signal to noise.
Also "intercept" evidence is inadmissible in court, so its not all that useful for convicting people.
Don't get me wrong, the UK like the USA has the ability to do all of this. But its used for specific actions (ie find a bomb-y needle in a haystack) where direct action is required.
AS I said, intercepted evidence won't convict someone here because it can't be used as evidence. so if they see that your messaging someone about planning some attrocity, you'll have to be caught in the act of planning, or a physical device with the messages have to be found.
You're accepting and normalizing deviancy through learned helplessness rather than rebelling and protesting it.
It's worth being aware the current police implementation of police LFR is explicitly not doing "tracking": it scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.
What if I covered myself in pictures of wanted suspects?
And the thing that absolutely fucks me off about all of this, is that we don't even get a lawful society in exchange for all of this. On one hand, there's no privacy anywhere. On the other - have your car stolen or a bike? House broken into? Phone snatched out of your hands? Good luck getting anyone to care about this in the slightest. You'd think with all the surveillance tech we'd be living in a nightmare panopticon, but at least petty crime should be eliminated, but nope, sometimes I wonder what's the point of being a law abiding citizen if just stealing has zero consequences and just seems not prosecuted at all.
Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.
And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????
There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.
Well, this about protecting the state from people that threaten it or its policies. I don't think it ever was about making us live in a safer city.
Snatched your phone? Sorry mate. But some old lady better not be walking around with a tshirt that says "I support Palestine Action".
It's strange to me that in your bubble you think the police in the UK are mainly there to hassle the "Palestine" protestors and interrupt their peaceful "From the river to the sea" chants.
I would say it's a lot more serious that they did nothing to stop the organized Pakistani child-rape gangs, out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it.
Either way I can agree with you that it doesn't seem like the police in the UK are using their great power to do much good.
The grooming gangs weren't prosecuted because the police were part of the grooming gangs. Basically an Epstein situation. Nothing to do with race.
Just think about it a bit more. You’ll get there.
Specifically, think about the reaction you are having based on 1/ your perceived outcomes and 2/ their explanations for it. They seem pretty aligned to me, based on where you are directing your anger. So job well done on their part.
> out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it.
this didnt happen btw
the grooming gangs have largely had white perpetrators and all investigations into the police found that they simply do not listen to women, specially those of working class.
Rotherdam where the big asian men case was found, it lasted 17 years and the police had been investigated twice and failed catastrophically both times. With severe reforms recommended and never implemented. And the fear of being racist had never come up.
The case of the grooming gangs gained attention in 2011. And in 2016 the ex chief of police AFTER being investigated and fired due to gross errors then said that he didnt do more because he was afraid of being called racist.
The subsequent report in 2020 from the conservative goverment had that line too, although it also had copy pasted lines from american far right think tanks.
It seems like a convinient excuse to the fact that the police have shown 0 interest in helping poor people in the country for decades, and have shown misogynistic and racist behaviour in every internal investigation ever done (including the 750 page one done after a cop ra ped and murdered Sarah Everrat)
But I guess decades of internal reviews, consistent problems highlighted and demands for police reform can all be ignored due to the convinient excuse of a fired imbecile who allowed hundreds of girls to be hurt under his watch. There was video evidence, he saw and was brought to a judge and ignored because he thought all girls from council states are basically whores. But I am sure he didnt stop it because the people doing it in his case were pakistani. The grooming gang in scotland that were all white must have been because the cops thought the gang might also be foreign? The school grooming gang in Nottingham which was a catholic school and the priests were just moved, those cops also feared that jesus was pakistani?
I think it's even worse than that. If at some remote possibility that a criminal does get caught and charged with a crime, the prisons are full (37% foreign criminals [0]) so they won't do any prison time, and therefore no justice is served. In fact our prisons are so full, violent criminals are being let out after serving only their half term [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyrkz9ryr5o
> violent criminals are being let out after serving only their half term
G20 country prison systems that I'm aware of have early release programs, it's almost a requirement to optimise what space there is for those that most deserve prison.
What's at issue with [1] is where, in actual fact, do a couple of teenagers who nicked a quad bike and likely very unintentionally also'd a manslaughter fall on the "violent criminal" spectrum.
> those that most deserve prison
You mean those that are the biggest danger to the government as opposed to the biggest danger to regular citizens.
> 37% foreign criminals
Why is this statistic relevant?
It's incorrect at a minimum. Reading the source provided:
>76,869 British nationals were recorded in the prison population at the end of the first quarter of 2024. The remainder of the population was made up of 10,422 foreign nationals, making up 11.9% of the total population, with an additional 578 having no nationality recorded.
It seems the 37% figure may have come from an entry in the table breaking down those non-British nationalities by country:
>All other nationalities 3,899 37.4%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_prison_populati...
It sounds very believable too since here in Belgium it's 44% foreign nationals.
How is it not relevant in a discussion about crime?
It's isolated and out of context, at the very least it needs an indication of the proportion of foreign born people in London, a major city with a large international population.
At one extreme, if the population of London happened to be almost entirely foreign born then it would seem that UK citizens are working overtime at London crime.
Dude monitoring if your neighbor has paid their car taxes is some real Stasi shit.
You can probably thank Thatcher and the cabal of idiots dumber than lettuce that is the Tory party. Squeeze the poor, squeeze the state budget that even the police force is under-resourced, give the money to their buddies.
E.g. with North Sea oil: https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/214768/economics/norway-u...
Norway is rich and socialist. I was there a while ago and their billboards had ads from their national refugee council asking for donations... on the Friday evening there was a march for Palestine in downtown Oslo. Imagine how well that would go down in the UK "society".
The problem with the UK is that the rulers are far more criminal than the people.
They set out to rob the nation's wealth in the late 70s, and they largely succeeded.
Neither Norway, nor any other Scandinavian country is socialist. We're just taxed up the arse.
Which may be worse upon reflection: use capitalism to produce the goods, then taxation to redistribute them
It's called anarchy-tyranny, where the government fails to enforce basic laws and keep people safe from real criminals (anarchy), but instead uses its power to tightly control, tax, and punish ordinary, law-abiding citizens (tyranny). There are various conspiratorial theories for why this happens but I think the simplest explanation is that an ineffective government cannot deal with criminals and goes after the easier and more compliant targets instead.
Why don't we all become criminals then? Seems easier. I'll start: here's a VPN you can connect to to access porn sites.
Why anarchy = criminal?
"Anarchy" in that phrase is fucking wrong. Unsophisticated people assume that anarchy means "no rules", which is false. It means no rulers, not no rules. (More precisely, it means no non-rulers.)
A better term would be "warlordism", if you want to emphasise the lawlessness of the financial class, or maybe "feudalism" to emphasise that the financial class and the political class are congruent.
Anarchy means "without government" or "without rulers". Seems fine to emphasize the government isn't acting like one.
Criminal organizations also have rules.
It’s illegal to wear a balaclava in Britain while driving an electric motorcycle?
It's this story, I think: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyrwnnqnw0o
They seem to be attacking non-electric cyclists, for fun. Shades of mods and rockers.
It's not the balaclava part I have an issue with, if you couldn't guess.
Oh. Are you one of those people that think that electric vehicles are stupid and that we should stick to gasoline engines like God intended?
Are you one of those people who think riding an electric motorcycle across our parks and on cycling paths is completely fine and just kids messing about? Or did you just miss that part of my comment?
I mean, violent crime and homicide is essentially at all time lows (or at least since we all started living in dense cities after the war) in the UK.
That has been the trend for decades in lots of other developed countries as well. It doesn't have to be in any way because of increased means of surveillance.
Exactly. Turns out most people don't get violent when they are content.
Correct. It's another thing that's hard to come to terms with - I know that statistically robberies, theft and violent crimes are going down. But I also know several people who had their garages broken into and their bikes and cars stolen. And in every one of these cases, the police won't even show up to look at the damage, take fingerprints, literally nothing - it's just "here's a case number, contact your insurer, we'll call you back if we ever find anything". In fact I know one guy in Manchester who had his Range Rover stolen, then found it in a supermarket car park 2 days later. Rang the police and they were literally like "well, if you have the keys then just....take it back". And he was like "wait, you don't want to come over, check it for fingerprints, drugs, any trace of anything that would help you find the criminals?". And they basically said no, they have no officers available, so just take the car and tell your insurer the case is closed and you got the car back, that's it.
I know the anecdotes don't help - they are just anecdotes. But man, it really doesn't fill me with confidence that I'd be given much help if this happened to me.
> Or in another anecdote
No, man, anecdotes are more often than not pure misinformation. You live in a country where car theft has absolutely plummeted in the last 30 years. Look it up, I guarantee it. 100 %. I'm almost certain it's the same for bike theft too.
And yet, crime is doing fine. This tells you what the surveillance state is really for.
Frankly this is the least of the problems we have.
There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.
Citation please. "Proactively" is just untrue.
Internet Connection Records is the key phrase to search for
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.
Also I think that this is just adding face recognition on a already camera-ladden system.
“Just” is doing a lot of work there
I noticed that in my country delivery couriers on e-bikes sometimes cover their face completely, with a balaclava and a ski mask. They ride at high speeds around pedestrians, break all traffic rules and obviously they prefer to opt out from facial recognition.
Maybe we should start wearing masks in public too. There is no upsides in going around with an open face.
In France and Germany it's illegal to wear a mask in public. If it's not already in the UK, I'm sure it soon will be.
What about Muslim clothes that cover the face entirely?
They are illegal.
...they are banned as well?
does this include Respiratory protection masks? The ones we just were pressured to always wear in public.
Yes, they're illegal but the law is only enforced selectively.
Britain is the original Orwellian society!!
They even practice DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink in Blighty, especially in government and parliamentary circles.
You could be confusing that with cockney slang. ;)
It will be fine. Most Brits are comfortable with the poor quality of Orwell commentary from over the pond. American Orwell fans mostly don't even read his key novels like Keep the Aspadistra Flying, just his juvenile science fiction stuff.
Juvenile science fiction?! He wrote 1984 in 1948 and died two years later at age 46. So I would say that was his most mature work...
The odd thing is Americans seem to take Aldous Huxley enormously more seriously than the Brits do, and they may be right in doing so.
I'm going to pretend you're talking about The Doors of Perception. Even though you are obviously talking about Brave New World.
I'll just drop:
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_(Huxley_novel)I had a perhaps overly heavy consumption of {X}-topia literature in my early teens.
I'm a huge fan of Eric Blair's writing. Looking at the bookshelf now: "Down and out in Paris and London" is what I've reread the most (I've got two copies, one ready for gifting).
Demoting Orwell's masterpieces (1984 and Animal Farm) to "juvenile science fiction stuff" while holding up Keep the Aspidistra Flying—a mid-tier social realism novel about a middle-class poet struggling with commercialism—is top-tier British condescension (extra points for misspelling Aspidistra while doing so).
How else can you keep ahead of the bots and their em-dashes other than by the use of pointless condescension and subtle misspellings? I mean, you've got to find a niche somehow.
To be fair, while I enjoyed the fun language shenanigans and propaganda and political commentary of 1984, the actual plot was pretty bad imho. Then again one way of reading it is the protagonist is actually paranoid and is exaggerating everything, which isn't entirely a dig against Orwell. He was just aheaf of the curve with self insert fan fiction.
I think my favorite part of the book was when it just turned into reading the political thesis on the essence of oligarichal collectivism or whatever it is. It's a great cynical parody of modern society, but I still think everyone misses the point is that it isn't so much about surveillance as it's about power through language.
You could just as easily have the book set in 1884 without any of the "future tech" and have basically the same plot going around with busybodies and peeping toms filling the rolls of the telescreens.
Hahaha
Let me guess - you live in the UK?
The issue with all this surveillance is that it always ends up with suppression of dissent and silencing of opposition by abusing enforcement agencies.
All such surveillance should start with 24-hour live video feed of private lives of all politicians... they carry immense power and control, and thus, warrant an equally powerful monitoring and scrutiny compared to common people.
This is never going to fly, and expecting it is waste of time and energy that could have been used more productively.
Think for a second or two about the type of folks who get, succeed and even thrive in politics over decades. Not your regular Joe, not a nice friendly balanced individual. No, biggest fuckups with massive daddy issues, school bullies, unresolvable inferiority complexes, sociopaths to the core, for whom the lure of money and power over others trumps everything else. This is the default, regardless of country. Look at politics through such optics and many things will start to make sense, also one would gain more realistic expectations from those folks.
Now, why would such people ever allow that, to expose all their deep flaws to whole world?
Why... because you can use their own argument to make your case as a common person... for example, you just gave one of those: "...to expose all their deep flaws to whole world?" Everyone has those.. why should common people give away those.
It's not about making it happen on them.. it's about forcing them to defend this application on them.. and then using the same argument to application on common people...
As The Joker famously said: "It's about sending a message" lol :)
Why do you think they should get a choice about it?
Because we designed the system in a way that things only happen if they vote for them to happen.
Or are you going to personally install a camera in every politician's house without their knowledge or consent?
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.
Prosperity?
Yes, prosperity. And safety. China is well above the UK in prosperity and safety.
What point are you making? Can you elaborate?
The hubris for surveillance in UK is staggering, what will they do next - roll out the social score system so you'll be banned from taking the tube if you express too much non sanctioned thoughts online?
> The hubris for surveillance in UK is staggering
Yet the UK doesnt have private systems such as Flock like the US does.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-strategic-partnership...
Ah yes, how could we forget that the grass is always greyer in the other dystopia. That makes everything OK.
I'm waiting for them to turn every wifi router in 3D tracking nodes that monitor the exact location and body position of everyone nearby in buildings. Its too juicy of target once they get the tech fully figured out.
they already put more people in jail than any other country for expressing the wrong opinions on social networks
"Wrong opinions" as in death threats and similar light-hearted stuff?
I wonder when the catch all "death threats" ever became a commonly accepted excuse for locking people up. That should be reserved for cases where people are a threat to others, which is only tangentially related to the direct statements they have made.
Lucy Connolly is the archetypal case. Tell me in your own words what Lucy did and whether she should have been punished. Make sure to quote the entire tweet.
Going by the imaged tweet in https://x.com/piersmorgan/status/1925826687679279491 she expressed dissatisfaction with government immigration policies and advocated for vigilante action to compensate for perceived failures of the government including the destruction of housing facilities. The framing also makes it clear that the statement was an emotional response to very real crimes that have been committed and which to this day have not been adequately addressed by the government. Meanwhile she made only a vague call to action without any concrete plan that could lead anyone without an agenda to believe that she would be following through with it. Essentially, she committed barely more than a thought crime. If you think that this is the kind of person that people who have demonstrated their willingness and ability to commit violent crimes should be released to make prison space for then you are absolutely bonkers.
I guarantee you that exactly the same statement made about other groups would not even lead to an investigation.
Quote the entire tweet.
I've seen too many that didn't post targeted death threats. Also of people who posted stuff that could be interpreted as vague calls to action when riots were happening. It becomes notewhorty tho that those people of note making a facebook posts got punished harder than the average rioter and reprisal seems to disproportionately target action that establishment might feel threathened by.
From my experience it's easy to find plenty similar or even more direct or more hatefull messages or calls to action regarding other places, events or more minor movements. But those come from minorities or involve movements with less momentum or movements abroad.
On the one hand, I hate the expansion of authoritarian power by the state.
On the other, I do think that we should put people in prison for posting on facebook. That way I won't have to keep seeing my crazy uncle at family gatherings!
I can't help but think you'll get a lot more crazy uncles as more people subconsciously (and consciously) feel the social contract has been broken and democratic deficits persist. There will just be more social cooling with all the dog whistles that follow.
Not surprised by this move, the UK is preparing to silence dissent, for a very simple reason: tough times ahead. Guardian reported yesterday the UK might face food shortages, their young are increasingly burdened with supporting the triple lock through their taxes, and people are making exit plans rathert than be milked for their hard work.
This did not end well for freedom in Russia (see Moscow underground face recognition tech targeting dissidents). This will not end well for democracy in Europe.
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.
It's to get people used to the idea without giving enough surface area to fight it socially. Same thing happened with the body scanners at airports in the US, now with facial recognition at airports, and a number of other privacy concerns. It's a well-worn and proven playbook.
At first it's a trial, experimental. Then it's standard, but optional and with incentives to do it. Then it's standard but you can opt out and there's lots of signs to tell you how. Slowly they make it more uncomfortable to opt out, and the signs disappear, and they berate you for trying it. Eventually it is no longer legal to opt out.
Any one step is hard to fight back against without looking like a loon to people who don't care about this kind of thing, and over the course of a few years you can take people gently through a process that, had it happened suddenly, would never have succeeded due to pushback.
Yes, the good old boiling the frog tactic.
I don't think it's very scientific, more of a procurement process.
100%
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
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?
None of what they said could logically lead to that conclusion.
These are the techniques police have been using to suppress protests without mass surveillance.
Let's see. As I, a seemingly private citizen, do not participate in any of these "events", but find they cause my anxiety and PTSD to go completely off the rails when all I want is a low-stress way to deal with my personal needs, not repeated antagonistic interactions when these things go on (and for who knows what reason, I seem to be someone these non-peaceful people like to provoke when it is going on), it seems to my benefit to be not for things that irritate the hell out of me. I can see no case where I personally would feel comfortable with scanning of my face though, if I can help it (yes, I know it goes on). I do not feel safer with mass surveillance.
As usual, it depends. "Peaceful" is a very subjective term. Like the mostly peaceful but fiery protests in Wisconsin.
And what it depends on is mainly which side "won" in the end and gets to write the history.
OWS https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/26/occupy-oakland...
BLM https://rubberbullets.longlead.com/chapter/minneapolis-polic...
No Kings https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/15/us/no-kings-protest-usc-stude...
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).
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?
Or fare dodgers. Of which there are many thanks to the chocolate teapot of ticket security e.g. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/tfl-fare-dodger-caught-using-08360...
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...
What do you do?
Walk up and place him under arrest. He might have a bomb. He might have a trigger for it, or he might have a dead-man's switch. It might detonate and kill you along with bystanders. That's a risk you take.
Unless you know with certainty that he has a bomb and does not have a dead man's switch, you don't just take his life because you're concerned about what-ifs.
It's no different than cops killing a man because he was holding a wallet, which they imagined might be a gun (e.g. Amadou Diallo).
Police need to stop pretending that they exist within fiction, where the outcome is known by the author. Just because you're afraid of something doesn't mean it's an actual threat.
Since 2001, there's been a real uptick in confusing fear and suspicion for evidence and knowledge.
There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now...
Is the suspect black?
(I'm asking this because there is evidence suggesting current facial recognition technology is less accurate at matching faces from some demographics, including black people. Why, what did you think I meant?)
Is this still an issue though? I'm not saying it isn't an issue, but this has been widely cited for years now and I find it hard to believe something hasn't been done about that.
As an illustration of this, 100% of the detections in the trial in 2026 have been false positives. Scanning tens of thousands of faces for each deployment, they’ve had exactly one detection, which was false:
https://www.btp.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/images/british...
Yes, 1 is 100% of 1, but doesn’t that simply mean they need a bigger sample?
These are different problems, with different sensitivity/selectivity (and fail modes)
It's one thing to identify a person from a database, another from camera 1, then camera 2 etc. My guess is the latter has a much lower false positive rate
How would that work? Easiest way to stop protests is to block off the area of the planned protest and arrest people who try to enter it. It’s not clear to me how facial recognition on the tube would help from a practical point or view.
Also, this seems to just be a trial expanding existing time and location scoped deployments of live facial recognition into a new environment, rather than a trial run for always-on live facial recognition across the tube network.
Identify attendees and key figures from social media → pick them up when detected on public transport.
The real issue is not (just) this specific use case, rather it's the govt generally knowing where people are going and where they have historically been.
If they can ID them they can go to where they live. The gov has records of its population
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?
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).
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.
We're not talking about some notion of thoughtcrime here.
We're talking about preparation, and the equivalent of reasonable suspicion for a stop or probable cause for an arrest in the USA, where people absolutely are arrested every day for things an officer has seen enough evidence to believe are about to happen.
Whenever someone suggests it's OK for the police to arrest people for future crime they haven't committed I feel the need to point out that the police do not always act in the public interest. Individuals abuse their powers.
e.g. when they do things like holding illegal employment blacklist[1][2][3] of innocent people.
I don't want to live in a country where, for example, the police can punish you just because they don't like trade unions.
What's I find ironic is that all this police state bullshit never seems to actually deal with antisocial behaviour or low level crime, it's always for political infractions.
We have more CCTV in London than almost anywhere else on the planet and you still get harassed outside tube stations by organised gangs of soliciting very forcefully for "charity" collections.
1. https://www.parliament.uk/external/committees/committee-news...
2. https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/ico-40/construction-employ...
3. https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...
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.
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.
> What would be the failure case for the trial?
Every passenger taking the "nope" lane.
They are prepared to arrest 90 year old protestors at Palestinian matches for Israel, they won't stop until all critism of that illegal state is silenced.
It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things.
If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc.
Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images.
The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.
Putting it kindly, this is an incredibly optimistic interpretation of how historically the government and police have used their powers. There is a long and consistent history of UK police abusing powers, stretching legal definitions and using technology to target those outside the original mandate of a law or investigation.
Antiterrorism and anti-disorder laws sold to the public as needed to prevent serious threats have been used extensively outside of what I think most would consider reasonable to surveil people, restrict freedoms and harass. The prime example are the stop and search laws, used to search a large numbers of people, predominantly based on racial stereotype, with zero impact on terrorism.
Remember that the Met police is known to be institutionally racist & sexist. It is not an organisation to be trusted.
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.
Google can block access to your Google account, which is enormously disruptive for many people whose online lives are built around it. In some ways it could be more disruptive in the long term than an arrest.
I mean, quite a lot of people want that or think they want it in many Western societies. They want the police to be able to find criminals, they want their kids kept off social media, they want terrorists' comms to be intercepted, they want 'immigrants' to not be able to claim benefits, they want voters to be required to produce ID, they want all manner of joined-up information state capabilities and they don't give a shit if they're surveilled and caught up in it until/unless it bites them in the ass.
And the thing is that they're not necessarily wrong to want some of those things, but they don't understand or don't care about collateral damage or what you might perceive as a lack of freedom. So they will happily vote for it.
Democracies vote to shoot themselves in the foot all the time. Look around you.
> In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination.
By "may harm your defence" what is meant is that Miranda was modified to inform people who are arrested that magistrates and juries are fully allowed to infer that you might be seeking to mislead the court if you didn't tell the police something significant that you later rely on as a defence in court. You're still allowed to do it, and they are allowed to conclude it is sketchy. That's the point of the modification.
Juries do and did this anyway.
The modified Miranda doesn't say you have no right against self-incrimination; it now warns you that if something is crucial to your defence it might be in your interest to mention it so the jury doesn't think you are trying to shine them on.
It's important to understand that this happens in the context of a country that does not have a plea bargaining mechanism. Cases go to court if it is in the public interest that they do (and the police don't decide this). But you can still no-comment your way through an interview and you aren't going to be bullied by a prosecutor into accepting a plea deal.
Miranda is an American case and has no relevance to UK law, the precedents aren't interchangeable.
Of course but that is not really what I am asserting; I was just responding to an American in terms that are understood.
UK suspects on arrest are, nevertheless, read their rights in what is colloquially understood here as a "Miranda warning". It's my understanding that "Miranda rights" are a sort of colloquial shorthand in lots of countries, because we all see US crime procedurals.
(It's actually called "The Caution", and US Miranda rights were inspired by an earlier version, though AFAIR we borrowed back some changes that were influenced by the Miranda wording, before the contentious modification about "may harm your defence")
The subsequent "they modified Miranda" fuss made quite a bit of international news when it was introduced, with Americans sniping at us about changing it, arguing we'd taken away the right not to self-incriminate, etc., that we'd sullied the grand tradition of English Common Law, all that rather ironic snarking from the country that pioneered the abusive plea bargain system.
The Caution read at arrest is actually shorter in the UK; it doesn't mention that the cautioned have a right to an attorney or one will be appointed for them. They do, but the duty sergeant at the police station tells them that when they are booked.
You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
The only realistic protection here is a “decoy” partition, a partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS. That gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.
> You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence.
Again, no, not just "in an investigation".
It has to be an investigation that has reached the point where they have gone to a judge and got permission to serve written notice. The judge will ask them if there is a necessary and proportionate reason. There is then a timeframe in which you have to respond.
Police can't simply demand your PIN and charge you if you don't comply.
It doesn't make it OK if a judge says you have to incriminate yourself or face jail time for not doing so. So either way you're screwed if it gets to that.
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.
And this is how new makeup trends will get started to fool the facial recognition
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.
Like 10 years ago I realized that facial recognition research was basically on the same level as weapons research, if not worse. So many nefarious usages.
Every researcher and product designer who leaned into this just has helped speedrun the world into a nasty place. But I guess I don’t have to type my passcode into my phone anymore!
[delayed]
21st century authoritarianism. Humans learned nothing from the 20th century.
Humans learned a lot. They learned some ways that don't work. That's why Germany learned to be more subtle, UK learned it needs more surveillance, France learned to ban face coverings, not Muslims, and USA learned how to properly stack the courts.
I'd argue that they actually learned it well, that's why we see anti-privacy stuff like this and Chat Control.
I just went through airport security. It’s been coming a long time. 2001 made a lot of people in the US, at least, normalize big brother.
i'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
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.
This time is different, they say.
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.
If Daily Mail journalist can be there on time to photograph the boats, the authorities could spend less time in the pub, and make some arrests...
Take people back to France? Feels pretty damn obvious to me. I believe they even agreed something like that fairly recently.
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.
> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available and images of anyone not on the authorised database will be deleted immediately and permanently.
So, massive invasion of privacy, but will only catch stupid criminals (and unsuspecting people who happen to have a strong resemblance with a criminal in the database?).
I think this refers to the trial.
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.
Yes, the "Big Scary Numbers" listing CCTV cameras per capita include private cameras, which can outnumber "public" (government, council and police) cameras by orders of magnitude. In the UK these include those owned by businesses and individuals, even things like ring doorbells cameras. There's no real equivalent numbers including that I can find for the USA. In 2024 there were some 16 thousand council operated cameras in London total [0] - well below the ~700k often touted including private cameras.
If you restrict it to just those public cameras, London would barely be in the top 10 of USA cities in public cameras per capita.
Sure, it's not good, but implicit in many comments here is "I'm glad it's not that bad here" (presumably the USA for most commentors), but in reality it is happening "here", has been happening "here" for some time, and in many ways is already much worse "here" already.
While I think many of the UK's actions around this are massive mistake, certainly don't read me as supporting it, at least understand that the big headlines and pointing away from home towards "Orwellian UK" is a misleading distraction.
[0] https://www.get-licensed.co.uk/reports/cctv-cameras-in-the-u...
“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.
The driving in Portugal is notoriously bad, yeah maybe not such a concern in your tourist experience in Lisbon center, because you can't really go fast. Get out on the motorways and country roads and your opinion will soon change.
Recording everything has a lot of upsides. Unfortunately, downsides for privacy and democracy are very real.
Talking about speeding, not sure. I am driving around Lisbon and speed limit is 50 in city, and lots of speed cameras. Though I am driving at 55 as limit and rarely see anyone going faster than that.
You are in a new country and feel that your kid needs protection, which is perfectly human, but does mean that your opinion is a bit biased.
As sibling comments mention, countries exist with many cameras, public or private, where driving feels worse. I didn't look at road deaths, but I'd be surprised if Portugal is among the leading countries on this.
Equally, if you take a bit of distance, you can realise that Portugal has many other parents living there, yet they are not clamouring for more surveillance: it's difficult to imagine that the Portuguese dictatorial government is evilly preventing its people from accessing the benefits of surveillance.
2024 stats, road accident fatalities, per million inhabitants:
Portugal: 58 Romania (highest in EU): 78 EU overall: 44 Sweden (lowest in EU): 20
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
So, depending on where OP is from, Portugal could seem a bit more dangerous or wildly more dangerous than their home county.
Take the train instead. It's much better here in europe.
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!
Could easily be used to track people who posted something bad on Twitter.
Like what?
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.
Well, no, this is a group of people who police are actively looking to arrest because they believe they've committed a crime. That's a different thing.
Could? Will.
"Could"? Have you seen what they've been doing to protesters?
>> Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.
They've already used facial recognition at protests.
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.
I don't mind it. I work in the same field and people don't want to work in government institutions anymore, there are less and less kids in police/military schools. Cameras allow officers to stop patrolling and do more preventive work, focus on hard cases, etc. In a relative small city we manage 500+ cameras and more are added every day. The problem is storage and finding people to monitor them. My only issue is getting it in hands of some crazy dictator, but that is another story.
> My only issue is getting it in hands of some crazy dictator, but that is another story.
That IS the story though. The kind of offences these cameras disuade pale in comparison with the risk of abuse of power infringed in the 99.999% of innocent people these cameras are pointed at suppose.
Most people don't grok the built-in threat. They only realize when inevitably they are in deep shit already, then all the 'how could we have known' empty phrases come to surface.
Every society gets what they deserve at the end (which doesn't mean every individual, thats why its optimal to live in society that has similar core values and moral 'height' to not be constantly depressed from fellow citizens and their decisions ie in voting).
Maintaining freedom requires continuous effort that can be unpleasant, not giving up privacies 1 by 1 to get deep into / maintain undisturbed comfort zone. Laziness is one way to kill freedom.
Just gonna drop this here for no particular reason
https://urban-privacy.com/pages/anti-surveillance-clothing
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?
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?
Class 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
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.
You’ve been drinking the propaganda again. Most cases don’t make it to court. The courts lean towards trusting the police. The police lean towards perjury.
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.
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
This does not answer my original question: why doesn't Britain give the north of Ireland back to the Irish? Why does it cling to it? Didn't Britain cause enough suffering for the Irish already?
Because (depending on the exact poll) either a majority of plurality of the people of Northern Ireland favor remaining in the UK, so it’s not that simple politically. The Good Friday Agreement has provisions for a change in the future status of Northern Ireland based on a referendum, so if/when a majority of its population want to join the Republic of Ireland, this can happen.
Northern Ireland receives heavy subsidies from the UK government. I imagine the UK would be quite happy to cede it to the Republic of Ireland were this politically feasible and not likely to kick off another round of sectarian violence. Ireland may want the six counties in principle, but might be a little unhappy with the bill.
They couldn't because the majority in the north wanted to be part on the UK, and democracy.
No matter what position one might take, for context, that's less than 1/4th.
And a majority of the south (a far greater majority btw) wanted out.
And they have been out for about 100 years. The problematic issue is the status of Northern Ireland, where a slim majority, or clear plurality, still favor remaining in the UK. The idea that everyone would be happy if “the Brits” just “left” Northern Ireland is incredibly naive. The Good Friday agreement already provides for the possibility of referenda on the future status of Northern Ireland. The suggestion that a sudden unilateral decision to cede Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland would reduce conflict and sectarian violence (which have already been very successfully reduced by the painstakingly negotiated GFA) is essentially too silly to even comment on.
The UK has encryption bans(backdoor on demand), VPN/Tor/I2P restrictions (illegal to advertise as bypasses), age/ID verification for websites and social media, age/ID verification for devices & app stores, key disclosure laws, mandatory mass metadata retention laws, and Google and Apple account required for online identity verification.
The US has none of those laws at the federal level.
> 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.
> I'm arguing you're dramatising the dire threat of terrorism on the good people sitting in the tube.
The threat has indeed been dire, and quite recently; the last jihadist bombing on the tube was less than ten years ago.
> Sorry for the tone,
I think you are not.
> your statement about the Irish being to blame for the Troubles
I did not say this.
Those of us who lived in London in the 90s very actively remember the IRA bombs and the relatively regular having to shelter in place, evacuate etc.
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.
Where are you getting the perception that Americans generally fear London?
I don't know a single American that has ever expressed any sentiment that London is unsafe. I know a few that have some stupid notions about immigrants in the UK, but that isn't exclusive to people on this side of the pond.
Genuinely, though. Americans just don't worry about safety in London outside of scams and petty crime inherent to any big tourist city.
I wouldn't say it's a general belief, but it is a point that certain groups like to push. See e.g. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/01/28/haters-on-the-r... (paywalled, but even the first paragraph is enough).
Donald Trump and Farage say so? Must be true.
Where is the evidence that it is a peculiarly American belief? Or were you just eager to pick on Americans
Now I look insensitive advocating against mass surveillance because of your personal experience.
Anyways. Very few people die to terrorism. It's just a great excuse to take away people's freedom because they are scared.
> You cannot live your life paranoid
Agree! Life is so much better.
> Twice I nearly lost my father to terrorism in London.
Oh. You just don’t know the definition of the word “paranoia”.
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.
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?
It is BTP, not London Underground, they are not the same thing.
Yes, but this instance of it was in the Underground station, whereas previous cases have been in the mainline Network Rail-operated stations.
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.
You'd be charged under the Computer Misuse act. /i
Good news! That means they're going to solve all that street crime, right?
You’ll get arrested instead for posting a meme calling out crimes
Ya got a loisence for that face, mate?
What does this comment actually contribute? Please go read the guidelines [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
can't wait for these to normalize https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cyberpunk+oni+mask&iar=images
All that would be left is gait and biometric analysis, as well as any electronic signalling coming from the tracking device everyone carries in their pocket.
I have it on good authority they have been doing this for years, maybe this is just an increase to inside the station or maybe just a good time to normalise this…
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.
The UK doesn't have 軍隊式教育 and that is a major factor in why Japanese society works as well as it does.
> UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next...gambling
The UK is banning gambling? Really?
They might talk about it, but gambling is a huge industry in the US and many different types of gambling are possible and have been for decades/centuries. It is far less restrictive than many other major countries on gambling I would say e.g. US, China, Australia etc.
Yes. With the exception of state owned lotteries. Eliminating the competition.
The US pays lip service to some major freedoms but I think the reality is far from that. US police crack down violently on protests and have for a long time. Their police are far more violent and vindictive in general. Several states have porn bans. Fireworks are restricted heavily in many places. You can buy a house and end up with a random group of locals controlling what you can and can't do with it. You're looking at it through rose tinted glasses.
On top of that, a lot of the larger restrictions we have are borne out of the USA. The war on drugs. The consequences, and subsequent security restrictions we have, thanks to their 'war on terror'.
Binface is safe.
seems like something positive thing is happening in UK.
What if I wear adversarial makeup which fucks up my facial vectors ?
Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?
Comments here seem like an ideological kneejerk response.
You assume it will be used in good faith which is charitable. It doesn't even need to take an authoritarian regime to pervert this technology. Abusive police officers in the US for example use Flock to stalk ex girlfriends.
> Abusive police officers in the US for example use Flock to stalk ex girlfriends.
the UK is not the US ;)
Yes I'm sure their police force is entirely free of any psychological problems and in no way selects for people who might be incline to abuse their position of authority.
Oh wait, this came out just yesterday:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/10/detective-respon...
on a micro level there are always specific cases of individual in group did a thing.
but we have a totally different approach to policing, which is what i was actually meaning https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56834733
> The report looked at police training requirements in more than 100 countries and found that the US had among the lowest, in terms of average hours required.
> Also, many other countries require officers to have a university degree - or equivalent - before joining the police, but in the US most forces just require the equivalent of a high-school diploma.
Good friend is a criminal defense barrister. Most polite thing I can say is that you are drawing incorrect conclusions from the data you have.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument.
honestly, i've found that it's usually better to not engage in these threads. the likelihood of a good faith discussion is very low. as you point out, it's mostly ideological kneejerk reactions rather than actual discussion based on considered viewpoints. but i'll give it a go.
i personally don't like this for a few reasons. possibility of data leaks, ick factor via my built-in paranoia around being watched/recorded, possibility of false positives etc. but i have some faith in TfL / BTP to not piss about in an egregious way. we have pretty decent checks and balances these days for UK police compared to the past and definitely compared to some police forces in the states. i'm also aware that as a man i tend to not experience the same shit that a lot of women have to deal with on a daily basis.
so i might be willing to accept it as part of a necessary trade-off based on my real life experiences on the tube. i'd probably be willing to accept having my face recorded/pattern matched when using the tube if it either stops or helps to prosecute a sexual assault.
there is definitely a difference between liking something and accepting it.
> 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?
Literally all normal people on the tube already pay with bank card or Apple Pay and are thus trackable anyway. This just levels the playing field for the barrier pushers.
Innocent of what exactly in whose eyes exactly? Everyone has secrets
The “main character” syndrome is strong here .. thing is, most people wouldn’t even be the main character in a movie about their own lives .. also if this helps catch criminals/terrorists/thieves .. what’s the actual harm to an innocent passenger ..
ps: great initiative by LU
I don't see how this is any different from how traffic cameras are used. Hot take, but as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal.
At first this made me upset - why should I be monitored? Then it hit me, years ago we had policemen/bobbies that would essentially do the same thing. Look at people - notice them.
It’s a shame they didn't launch this as bobbie v2 that would offer people useful services (like the one wearing a funny hat did): a way to alert police, information, directions. Heck it could even offer guidance for those in need to talk to someone. Truly a missed opportunity.
> 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.
Hot take, but as long as human dose not need to eat food half of the political problem will be solved.
How traffic cameras are used arguably is a big deal.
police have been running facial recognition at london protests for years already. so is this just making it official?
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.
It's the usual responses isn't it: _'I'm saddened'_ or, _'what has happened to Britain'_. Had a look at America, Russia, or Belarus, etc.?
Living in the UK is fantastic.
Two things can be true here
1. The UK "surveillance state" narrative pushed in the US is overblown and we do not think about it or care about it as much as Americans do
2. Living in the UK is not "fantastic" for a decent percentage of people. Cost of living is insane.
Those are not exactly high standards to measure against?
Sure… just a post a mean meme and see what happens
The UK spent years denouncing China for scanning their own citizens faces in public, to finally do it themselves
They became the very thing they called the enemy of their own citizens
The irony..
Begs the question: what's next?
Erich Mielke smiles from his grave.
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"?
Ceremonial knives
Henry Nowak
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...
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
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.
mask up.
I don't know UK law but assume they already made that illegal.
> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available
So what is the point ?
Sadly, it seems to me that what we are witnessing in our era is a convergence of technology-enhanced surveillance governance globally, greatly eroding personal agency and democratic capacity to institute change.
We desperately need utopian futures but seem to be getting only dystopias regardless of origin state and nominal political ideology: almost as if 1984, Animal Farm, Enemy of the State, Gattaca, Terminator, and THX 1138 had a Waterworld-Mad Max setting.
We should each try to imagine a technology-enabled future utopia and build an enabling technology instead of contributing to this sort of thing - which already exists in most countries not to mention financial surveillance, internet surveillance, mobile phone surveillance, vehicle and commercial flight/ship surveillance.
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.
Als sie die Juden einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude.
Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.
To be honest I don't see the point. Anyone committing a crime goes around in a balaclava these days so facial recognition won't be much use. They'd have much more success just banning face coverings and there would be plenty of support for it.
The problems we have are much deeper though. Petty crime is out of control and it's impacting society in obvious ways. Just go to a shop to see the measures they have to take to try to reduce theft. We don't have enough police due to a decade or two of underfunding. And even if we did we don't have enough prison space to even let harder criminals finish out their sentences - so what's the point in arresting petty criminals?
Saying that London is still one of the safest major cities in the world. Safer than any major US city. I've been living here a long time and the worst I've seen is a few phone thefts. I can walk pretty much anywhere safely at any time of the day or night. Don't let the fear mongering online fool you.
In Beijing underground doesn't scan people's faces.
They also don't arrest for internet memes.
Just saying.
winnie the poo?
Fascist monarchy has facist policies shocker. So glad I left that hell hole.
Oi, you have a loicense for that mate?
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.
If it helps stop antisemitism then i'm all for it
OK. There's not much antisemitism in London though. It's a major world city.
Wouldn't want some bloke getting away on the London Underground after blaspheming Islam.