Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

news.sky.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 636 posts

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#81

Post by andrepd »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #76
jacquesm wrote: post #30

Orwell was way too kind.

He just had no conception of all the fun technologies that would later come along in a digitized, microprocessor-rich world of the future. Reading 1984 today, you want to laught at the simplistic and almost benign weakness of telescreens for surveillance. Were Orwell to have been deeply informed about the surviellance mechanisms of the future, he'd likely be both surprised into horror at their innovative intrusions,…

The last part wits the nail on the head. Orwell envisioned a future where everyone was forced to have a telescreen watching them at all times. He never for a second dreamed of a future where people would buy a telescreen for the most trifling convenience of going "alexa, is it going to rain today".

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#82

Post by mrtksn »

burkaman wrote: post #67
mrtksn wrote: post #56

It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state. Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations tha…

Honestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.

Right, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level.

This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations.

The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading.

What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#83

Post by Lio »

cmcaleer wrote: post #58
mytailorisrich wrote: post #51

In itself this is a storm in a teacup. The important question, only important question IMHO, is how they handle positives. Do they go all guns blazing and arrest the person on the spot? Or do they use a restrained approach and first nicely ask the person if they have any ID, etc? That's the important bit.

Then what happens if you don't have ID on you (which, for now, is entirely legal in the UK)? What if you're hours from home? Do you then need to completely cancel your day to spend it with the cops instead satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat? What if you refuse to cooperate because you have better things to do than waste your time with the police? I'm sure that'll go well for you.…

It's also worth noting that if you are arrested for a serious offence your DNA and biometrics will taken and held for ever even if you are release without charge and the real perpetrator latter convicted.

In the eyes of the law you will be innocent but you'll still be treated like a criminal.

The same could accidentally happen for a minor offence too.

West Yorkshire, West Mids, The Met and Great Manchester Police have all made admin "mistakes"[1] where they failed to delete DNA evidence since the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 came into force.

No one has been sanctioned or fined for those mistakes.

You might not think being on that list matters but during the good ol' days of the 1980s innocent trades union activists were placed on a secret list by the Met's Special Branch and that list passed potential empoyers to bar them from getting jobs.

Again, no one punished for that and if it's happend once it can happen again.

See the Scott Inquiry for details.

1. These scare quotes are because I don't beleive this always happens through incompetence. I'm not saying it's always the case but some of the time the police are just ignoring the rules because the rules have no teeth.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#84

Post by spacebanana7 »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #45

As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere. The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police. The obvious…

The British state is actually very effective at doing what it wants to do - it just doesn't want to do the things we consider to be 'right'.

The government prioritises order over law, liquidity over solvency and the status of our politicians at international dinner parties.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#85

Post by ivell »

spwa4 wrote: post #29
ebiester wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you’re not trans. And you don’t perform drag. And you don’t go to an event with a lot of gay people. And you don’t get mistaken for someone because ai isn’t perfect. (Especially if your race doesn’t have many people in the dataset.) But the people that don’t have anything to fear don’t see anything wrong with “inconveniencing” these groups.

This is the UK, and it's the police controlling these vans. So trans, drag and gay are not at issue here. And somehow, the countries where it is a problem are never discussed. All muslim countries, for example, almost like not all religions are equal ... if you read hrw or amnesty you'll find that even the most moderate muslim countries like Morocco or Turkey deal violently with sexuality (all forms, really, yes, bei…

I guess at present the UK is very tolerant. But no one can predict the future. It can go downhill. Even for developed western countries. Once surveillance is setup, it is hard to restrict its usage. Especially when the society gets used to it.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#86

Post by southernplaces7 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #65
cmcaleer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what happens if you don't have ID on you (which, for now, is entirely legal in the UK)? What if you're hours from home? Do you then need to completely cancel your day to spend it with the cops instead satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat? What if you refuse to cooperate because you have better things to do than waste your time with the police? I'm sure that'll go well for you.…

What happens when a police constable thinks they recognise you from evidence they have in an investigation or a wanted person notice? This is nothing new. It is all about what is reasonable in the circumstances.

Again worth mentioning something I've mentioned in other comments, and it's enormously obvious: There's a massive differene between unluckily being misindentified by some random copper who needs to get his memory or eyesight checked, and the percentage of false positives that's nearly guaranteed from a mass digital facial rec surviellance system working around the clock on categorizing millions of faces all over the country. The first is a bit of bad luck, the second will likely become pervasive, systemic and lead to assorted other shit consequences for many people being cross-checked and categorized in all kinds of insidiuous ways

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#87

Post by [deleted] »

jl6 wrote: post #26

> Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology. Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?

[deleted]

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#88

Post by mytailorisrich »

cmcaleer wrote: post #79
mytailorisrich wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when a police constable thinks they recognise you from evidence they have in an investigation or a wanted person notice? This is nothing new. It is all about what is reasonable in the circumstances.

A constable is not going to be scanning the faces everyone going to Wembley in one night. Even 100 constables looking at faces entering faces going to Wembley is not going to scan everyone and recognise someone they know from a wanted poster (of maybe a couple hundred faces in their head). The Met have already lied about the scale of false positives[0] by nearly 1000x, and it's not obvious how much better it will get…

> [0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945

The article does not claim this:

"The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.

But the error count is much higher once someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive"

These are 2 different metrics that measure 2 different things and so they are both correct at the same time. But I must say I am not clear what each exactly means.

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#89

Post by mytailorisrich »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #86
mytailorisrich wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when a police constable thinks they recognise you from evidence they have in an investigation or a wanted person notice? This is nothing new. It is all about what is reasonable in the circumstances.

Again worth mentioning something I've mentioned in other comments, and it's enormously obvious: There's a massive differene between unluckily being misindentified by some random copper who needs to get his memory or eyesight checked, and the percentage of false positives that's nearly guaranteed from a mass digital facial rec surviellance system working around the clock on categorizing millions of faces all over the…

You raise a good point that if the system wrongly ID you once it means that you're probably liable to be flagged every time you walk past one of those vans...

Re: Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

#90

Post by johnisgood »

What is the point if there are people on many streets with CCTVs doing drugs openly. I saw a cop simply walk by someone overdosing. Nothing will happen.

Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?

(Again, what is the point of the down-vote? I am asking for people's thought and opinions in the hope of a fruitful conversation).

Post reply on HN