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Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

wired.co.uk

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Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#81

Post by joshvm »

gaius wrote: post #35
HenryBemis wrote: post #26

Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance. The "average Joe" has the "I got nothing to hide" and that "go get them paedophiles", which are very true statements. We are talking about a nation that has 4,200,000 [1] cameras surveilling them and nobody bats an eye about this. For some reason, Britons have decided (or was forced to them and they didn't push back) that privacy is not necessary, so, let them hav…

Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance. Here's a true story, a few years ago I was supervising a diver training session at a swimming pool in London, it was closed to members of the public at the time. My locker was broken into, my phone, tablet, credit cards, car keys and bizarrely a load of Mexican money I happened to have in my wallet was stolen, as were a couple of other lockers. Thank God I hadn't…

One of the arguments for mass surveillance is that you could hand over to another system if the suspect goes off-camera. So in this case, presumably they knew exactly what time the thief left the building and, provided everyone talks to each other, you could figure out where he went next. Ultimately you might be able to determine where the suspect lived or transition to a camera where better footage is available. Problem is that while we are watched en masse, most of these systems are separate. I'm not arguing that we should have this capability, but this is the obvious use-case.

The quality of CCTV footage (or lack of) is well known. How many times have you seen a news report with a blurry photo of a suspect and a plea for information? This is vague proof that mass surveillance is ineffective unless you throw serious manpower at it.

This is what happens in the case of serious terrorism cases, where the police can wave RIPA around and subpoena footage from everyone, but presumably tracking between cameras still requires a lot of manual intervention (and therefore money). Catching a locker thief isn't worth it.

Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#82

Post by pasabagi »

ppod wrote: post #77
KirinDave wrote: post #53

There is something very important in working out our tolerance to surveillance vs the utility that is absolutely impossible to get without risking surveillance. I can't really articulate it yet, but reading this article it occurs to me how really the old phone system didn't offer much more in the way of privacy (every phone call was recorded), but it offered more in the way of obscurity. Now that our information syst…

Societies that willingly forego privacy in order to allow things like social credit scores will have a large competitive advantage. The effect on social interaction and interaction with the state will be similar to the effect that tripadvisor has on restaurants, or that uber and lyft have on taxi customer service. Our historical models of losing privacy emphasise the state at the centre of the panoptican observing al…

I doubt it. A credit score is a good implementation of your material value to capitalism. If you have a bad credit score, you are punished exactly to the extent it makes sense from a statistical perspective.

'Social credit scores' muddy this system with a bunch of basically peripheral values: filial piety, political opinions, and so on. It undermines the basic efficiency of a system that only cares about you insofar as you matter - i.e. insofar as you're economically active.

The only way a 'social credit score' will help the system that institutes it is if the society is more stable as a result. I don't really see this happening, unless people like it. If everybody hates a society, you tend to get a kind of creeping malaise, where nobody believes in the system, and everybody's just trying to steal as much as they can from it - sort of like Russia in the 80's. No amount of repression will help you if all of your secret police are busy trying to sell every state asset they can get their hands on.

Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#83

Post by eeereerews »

mhb wrote: post #47
icc97 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it doesn't work then it should be taken down. It's even worse, it means the police know it doesn't track criminals and so just want to track regular people. It tests the water of how much the population is willing to be under surveillance. Like boiling a frog you don't notice how much surveillance there is until it's too late.

Like boiling a frog In 2002 Dr. Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that "The legend is entirely incorrect!" He described how a critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or 1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becom…

Must we have someone point this out whenever someone says "boiling a frog"? The use of the phrase does not constitute an factual assertion about whether you can, in fact, boil a frog.

Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#84

Post by Silhouette »

stordoff wrote: post #76
Silhouette wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More concerning would be a withdrawal from the ECHR, which focuses on fundamental human rights per se, not fundamental rights arising out of EU membership. Both are concerning, though. I was recently educated by a real lawyer about my idealistic view of the ECHR. It turns out that I had a fundamental misunderstanding for years, so I will share the essence of what they told me in case I wasn't the only one. (I am not…

This is more or less true, but what the ECHR/HRA does is place a very strong presumption at the heart of UK law that the government of the day will not seek to violate the rights granted under the ECHR. In practice, this means the courts will go to great lengths to interpret the law in line with them, even if it involving reading them in ways that is not readily apparent solely from the text of the Act, before resort…

Just to be clear, I wasn't advocating the loss of the ECHR/HRA benefits, merely that anything currently protected by the Charter and EUCJ should be established in primary legislation here as well, so that post-Brexit our own courts can take it into account directly.

My personal view is that parliamentary sovereignty is a dubious principle at best in this sort of situation, and that we are long overdue for constitutional reform such that the protection of fundamental rights is enshrined in a higher law and interpreted by a higher court over which even the government of the day does not have supremacy. Unfortunately, rather like reform of our blatantly broken electoral system, there seems little prospect of that any time soon, and so trying to protect those rights and freedoms as well as we practically can under our existing system may be the best we can do for now.

Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#85

Post by bo1024 »

ppod wrote: post #77
KirinDave wrote: post #53

There is something very important in working out our tolerance to surveillance vs the utility that is absolutely impossible to get without risking surveillance. I can't really articulate it yet, but reading this article it occurs to me how really the old phone system didn't offer much more in the way of privacy (every phone call was recorded), but it offered more in the way of obscurity. Now that our information syst…

Societies that willingly forego privacy in order to allow things like social credit scores will have a large competitive advantage. The effect on social interaction and interaction with the state will be similar to the effect that tripadvisor has on restaurants, or that uber and lyft have on taxi customer service. Our historical models of losing privacy emphasise the state at the centre of the panoptican observing al…

A short-term competitive advantage can come with long-term fragility and susceptibility to disaster. For instance, imagine two countries with identical resources, one increases its population so that yearly food production can barely sustain it, while the other has a smaller rate of growth. The first will have a competitive advantage every year until a drought comes, when it will be hit by disaster.

Similarly the competitive advantages you describe may come with long-term risks that are harder to measure or predict, especially those that come from the government itself.

Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#86

Post by Mefis »

pasabagi wrote: post #82
ppod wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Societies that willingly forego privacy in order to allow things like social credit scores will have a large competitive advantage. The effect on social interaction and interaction with the state will be similar to the effect that tripadvisor has on restaurants, or that uber and lyft have on taxi customer service. Our historical models of losing privacy emphasise the state at the centre of the panoptican observing al…

I doubt it. A credit score is a good implementation of your material value to capitalism. If you have a bad credit score, you are punished exactly to the extent it makes sense from a statistical perspective. 'Social credit scores' muddy this system with a bunch of basically peripheral values: filial piety, political opinions, and so on. It undermines the basic efficiency of a system that only cares about you insofar…

A social credi score will be more accurate in predicting credit worthiness. It has economic value.

Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#87

Post by gerdesj »

HenryBemis wrote: post #26

Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance. The "average Joe" has the "I got nothing to hide" and that "go get them paedophiles", which are very true statements. We are talking about a nation that has 4,200,000 [1] cameras surveilling them and nobody bats an eye about this. For some reason, Britons have decided (or was forced to them and they didn't push back) that privacy is not necessary, so, let them hav…

We are Britons in Britain. There is no one living here by the name of Average Joe. There are a lot of cameras here, many more than than some other places apparently. The vast majority of those cameras are in town and city centres or on the motorways. It is possible that in Britain we are able to count better (and publish) than some other regions and hence look bad in this regard - who knows.

I don't feel more "surveilled" here than I do in say Italy, France or the US (all of which I am pretty familiar with). I will say that I do feel looked upon when driving along the M42, south of Birmingham, there are a lot of cameras there but that area is a massive cross-road for the UK and an obvious place to want to keep an eye on.

Push back? Will do when things really do go wrong. You don't know us ... mate.

Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#88

Post by andrewaylett »

dozzie wrote: post #72
icc97 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't, I'm assuming they're speaking as a German. I'm a Brit living in Belgium. I see the difference and I wish I could have the privacy of no ID cards back.

> They don't They do, or at least that's what they said.

No, they claimed to be German, and _in that capacity_ responded to their parent.

Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#89

Post by yesenadam »

eeereerews wrote: post #83
mhb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like boiling a frog In 2002 Dr. Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that "The legend is entirely incorrect!" He described how a critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or 1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becom…

Must we have someone point this out whenever someone says "boiling a frog"? The use of the phrase does not constitute an factual assertion about whether you can, in fact, boil a frog.

No, but people using it think it's a fact about frogs. Comparisons involving it contain an assumption/presupposition that's unknowingly false. Jesus employed facts about e.g. lilies in his parables; I doubt dodgy urban myths would have cut it. Please permit the people not so smart as you on the internet to learn someone without having to hear "Arghh I know that". But maybe you've read someone pointing out the frog myth 1000 more times than I! In which case I sympathize.

edit: Hehe I left HN after writing that to do something 'more useful', reading The Inmates are Running the Asylum. On about the 2nd page I read was:

"A frog that’s slipped into a pot of cold water never recognizes the deadly rising temperature as the stove heats the pot. Instead, the heat anesthetizes the frog’s senses. I was unaware, like the frog, of my cameras’ slow march from easy to hard to use as they slowly became computerized."

Re: Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

#90

Post by yesenadam »

dvdhnt wrote: post #60
HenryBemis wrote: post #26

Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance. The "average Joe" has the "I got nothing to hide" and that "go get them paedophiles", which are very true statements. We are talking about a nation that has 4,200,000 [1] cameras surveilling them and nobody bats an eye about this. For some reason, Britons have decided (or was forced to them and they didn't push back) that privacy is not necessary, so, let them hav…

Okay, I'm going to toss out downvote material because I think it's important to say. > Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance. I think Americans are actually 99% comfortable with massive surveillance but can't admit it because of our culture. We consume reality TV like no one's business, watch YouTube to see people do dumb things in real life, and just in general, feel the urge to record and capture eve…

>Okay, I'm going to toss out downvote material because I think it's important to say.

I didn't get past that first sentence of irrelevant filler.

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