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

London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

btp.police.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 511 posts

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#271

Post by hammock »

_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…

> 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.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#272

Post by hammock »

d--b wrote: post #268
_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…

Also I think that this is just adding face recognition on a already camera-ladden system.

“Just” is doing a lot of work there

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#273

Post by burnt-resistor »

_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…

You're accepting and normalizing deviancy through learned helplessness rather than rebelling and protesting it.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#274

Post by hammock »

encom wrote: post #256
netsharc wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 refug…

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

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#275

Post by bananamogul »

gambiting wrote: post #185
_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…

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 panoptico…

It’s illegal to wear a balaclava in Britain while driving an electric motorcycle?

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#276

Post by juiceland »

hammock wrote: post #271
_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…

> 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.

I wish that Apple would make a way to require both FaceID and a passcode. This seems like an easy option to add.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#277

Post by aiisjustanif »

windowliker wrote: post #257
WalterBright wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!!

Happens often from what I remember reading and most grocery stores account for the loss. Definitely lots of accidents as well.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#278

Post by kaseijin »

eaenki wrote: post #207
tpholland wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

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.

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#279

Post by dash2 »

cge wrote: post #229
fragmede wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

#280

Post by ifwinterco »

vnnDiag wrote: post #250
WalterBright wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

Post reply on HN