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

news.sky.com

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

#71

Post by incone123 »

krapp wrote: post #64
runsWphotons wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I commented about this on another thread, and probably most around here disagree with my general point there, but this fact amazes me. We have gotten all this tech creating a surveillance state but then it isn't even used to give better policing. You will just get mugged on camera by someone with ten prior charges and then be ignored by police.

[flagged]

Not in Britain there isn't. We have constant retail theft and violence against staff and the Police and Crime Commissioner for Thames Valley asking the public to do the crime fighting

https://www.witneygazette.co.uk/news/25365950.thames-valley-...

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

#72

Post by bbqfog »

jadamson wrote: post #61
bbqfog wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's well known that UK police and politicians have abused children at scale, hence why Saville was able to get away with what he did. He was protected by the crown. There are even pictures of Ghislane Maxwell and Kevin Spacey sitting on the throne (can google it).

The grooming gangs in those towns consisted of men from a variety of occupations, though a clear pattern was the involvement of takeaways and taxi firms. The involvement of police and politicians was mostly limited to denial, dismissal, and cover-up. Although there have been individual allegations against local politicians[1] and police[2], they do little to help your case here. There certainly were thousands of vict…

> One woman says as a child she would hear a police officer having sex with girls in exchange for drugs and money.

That sounds like a lot more than denial to me! It’s safe to say any evidence gathered by the same cops raping kids should be thrown out.

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

#73

Post by jon-wood »

raspyberr wrote: post #63
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.

Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 means authorities can request encryption keys (passwords) from you and you can't say no. Investigatory Powers Act 2016 literally nicknamed Snoopers' Charter. Means ISPs keep all your traffic for minimum a year, police are given access to it, but politicians are exempt and need a warrant to have their data viewed?!?!? UK police have been rolling out Live Facial Recognition i…

> None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.

This is because most of the public don't care about those rights either, and are entirely happy with surveillance. You've got nothing to hide right? If you don't the government to know what you're looking at its probably because you're a paedo, or maybe a terrorist. Maybe even both.

Its not the government who need to be convinced on this, it's the general public, and currently there's not really anyone out there explaining how you can't have a backdoor that only the government and good guys will be able to use.

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

#74

Post by epanchin »

extraisland wrote: post #36

> The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias. I feel so much better! /sarcasm How tone deaf can they be? Whenever there are serious privacy concerns about how this sort of technology, you have a statement like attached. It doesn't address what people are worried…

The vast majority of newspaper articles/videos about this tech relate to innocent black people being flagged.

Racism is certainly the biggest concern of the media, which may or may not reflect the publics general concern.

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

#75

Post by jadamson »

bbqfog wrote: post #72
jadamson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grooming gangs in those towns consisted of men from a variety of occupations, though a clear pattern was the involvement of takeaways and taxi firms. The involvement of police and politicians was mostly limited to denial, dismissal, and cover-up. Although there have been individual allegations against local politicians[1] and police[2], they do little to help your case here. There certainly were thousands of vict…

> One woman says as a child she would hear a police officer having sex with girls in exchange for drugs and money. That sounds like a lot more than denial to me! It’s safe to say any evidence gathered by the same cops raping kids should be thrown out.

I said "mostly", did you miss that? The reality is that these gangs were overwhelmingly not made up of police or politicians, and they did indeed have thousands of victims.

We are long past the point where this sort of denialism will work - it will only generate further backlash. Is that your intention?

I'll leave you with a quote from Baroness Casey's recent report on the subject[1], the recommendations of which have been entirely accepted by the UK Government[2]:

> Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young White girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.

> Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue. This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/685559d05225e... (PDF)

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-audit-on...

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

#76

Post by southernplaces7 »

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, and completely unsurprised that such a vast percentage of the UK's (and world's) population completely accepts them with hardly a sigh.

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

#77

Post by grepnork »

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?

Currently, the police are catching up with shopping centres and entertainment chains who've been using this tech for years.

The Police themselves have been using facial recognition to scrub tapes for far longer than LFR.

Amusingly, the firm the gazanaughts have been complaining was being used to spy on Palestinians was recently sold to an American Parking Lot operator.

The time to complain about high street facial rec sailed by a decade ago.

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

#78

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

potato3732842 wrote: post #8
drcongo wrote: post #4

I'm so embarrassed to be British these days. We're a small island of small minded people.

Small mindedness (to use your words, though I think other sets of words are perhaps more descripitive) is a condition that spreads like the plague. If you don't constantly stamp it out through ostracizing and marginalizing the infected and those who intentionally create the conditions for it then you will be overrun.

We're already well into the process of being overrun so that strategy obviously didn't work.

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

#79

Post by cmcaleer »

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.

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. With the current tech, this rate will get worse as more faces are being looked for. If it's only looking for (I'm guessing) a thousand high-risk targets now and the rate is 1/40, as more and more faces get searched for this problem gets exponentially worse as the risk of feature collisions rise.

Of course, it'll also disproportionately affect ethnic groups who are more represented in this database too, making life for honest members of those groups more difficult than it already is.

The scale is what makes it different. The lack of accountability for the tech and the false confidence it gives police is what makes it different.

[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

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

#80

Post by andrepd »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #55
Shank wrote: post #22

The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?

Suppose it depends on what it's used for. We could trust the government to be good, but governments are made from people, elected by people. And people are often shitbags to each other. For all the CCTV in London I've been mugged twice and nothing was captured on CCTV nor were the police all that interested in doing anything about it. As an outsider living here I think the UK has huge social problems that are neglect…

CCTV can absolutely be made to be effective and protect citizen's privacy at the same time. A legal requirement to store only encrypted data, which can only be decrypted via a court warrant (so a similar standard to searching your home or tapping your phones, not the blanket panopticon they wish to create), plus enforcement and heavy fines + prison time for anyone caught storing unencrypted data.

You need political will for this and for enforcement to take it seriously, since the technology to do so is almost trivial nowadays.

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