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London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

btp.police.uk

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Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#141

Post by samudrijan »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #16
Traster wrote: post #13

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 b…

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?

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#143

Post by dghlsakjg »

samudrijan wrote: post #141
jambalaya8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#144

Post by andyjohnson0 »

fragmede wrote: post #38
Traster wrote: post #13

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 b…

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...

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#145

Post by contingencies »

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.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#146

Post by bobthepanda »

windowliker wrote: post #74
_fw wrote: post #53

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 surpr…

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 'inco…

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...

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#148

Post by SoftTalker »

windowliker wrote: post #74
_fw wrote: post #53

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 surpr…

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 'inco…

If people would not steal stuff from shops, the shops would not need cameras. We get the society our behavior creates.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#149

Post by criddell »

SoftTalker wrote: post #148
windowliker wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 'inco…

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?

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#150

Post by krisbolton »

steve_gh wrote: post #43
Traster wrote: post #13

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 b…

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 hap…

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.
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