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

>the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID.

In which case, their sergeant will tear them a new one, right after the custody sergeant has finished tearing their own hole because the careers of both of those people rely on supervising their coppers and supervising their arrests. If the custody sergeant has to release someone because the copper can't account for themselves, that is a very serious matter. The sergeant's can smell a bad arrest a mile away.

The copper has to stand up in a court of law, having sworn an oath, and testify on the reasonable suspicion or probable cause they had. If they are even suspected of lying, that's a gross misconduct in a public office investigation.

Assuming they weren't fired over that, any promotion hopes are gone, any possibility of involvement in major cases or crime squads, hope of a firearms ticket, advanced driving, or even overtime are gone. Their fellow officers will never trust them to make an arrest again.

It's not consequence free, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, or that some officers rely on you not knowing your rights, but it is a serious matter.

I have so much to hide.

I want to hide what I had for breakfast. I want to hide what books I read recently. I want to hide which TV shows I watch. I want to hide who I have conversations with. I want to hide who I avoid. I engage in so much completely legal behaviour, much of it quite laudable, that I simply want to hide.

trying to become a EU member state citizen as a UK citizen is still much easier then for many other countries

through often not on paper, but in practice, like the people which can throw rocks in your path do that less likely

in the end it's a question of job (in country you want to move to), money/liquidity, and moral restraints you have.

Like e.g. buying yourself citizen ship through an arranged marriage should be something like 30k-50k€ depending on EU state, context etc. And that is if you go through organized crime rings which take a cut.

And if are rich there probably should be a lot of more legal-ish ways to get citizenship. Some countries outright allow buying citizenship, but I think besides the "buying" cost you need to be quite stacked.

And if you have good job qualifications you might get a job in the EU -> long term right to stay -> and then find one way or another to convert it to citizenship. It's probably ethically most upright but also hardest path.

>Then what happens if you don't have ID

On arrest, you're required to provide your name and address, not proof. For the absolute majority of UK adults, it takes exactly 2 minutes to verify that data against public records - passport, driving licence, council tax, voter registration.

Lying in that situation is a separate criminal offence all of its own.

>satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat

Matches with a confidence rating of 0.7 is considered reliable enough to present to a human operator, and before any action is taken a serving police officer must verify the match, and upon arrest verify the match against the human.

>What if your child falls victim to a false identification

The age of criminal responsibility is 10, and absent any personal identification parental identification is the standard everywhere.

>15-year-old Child Q

The good old slippery slope fallacy. Both the officers who strip searched that child were fired for gross misconduct. North of 50,000 children are arrested each year and this happened once.

>Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?

Thing is 12 months on, 1035 arrests, over 700 charges, and that hasn't happened because the point of testing the scheme thoroughly was to stop that from happening.

What proof do you have that it doesn't work.

This is actually why I always considered Brave New World to be much closer in predicting the future, at least in spirit if not in hard details. Let people access personal distractions, conveniences and pleasures on your road to total surveillance, and attempts at social control, and you can apply them with very little need to ever enforce miseries like those of "1984"