HN

Comments (428)

• a2fz
  To provide clarity, this isn't (yet) (publicly) hooked up to the whole CCTV network of London Underground stations. Instead they use these temporary portable stations you can see at the end of the linked article.I went to Victoria station where they were doing this yesterday and the police seemed quite unhappy with me taking photos of them operating the facial recognition station and confronted me almost immediately. The irony...The area they were doing it in was completely swarming with far more police officers than usual, supposedly to "provide information".I had expected to see signs all around the station warning passengers that this trial was taking place, but the only ones I saw were directly in that area or by the stairs as you're walking down into it. They weren't small enough that I could characterise them as intentionally hard-to-miss, but I reckon with the amount of traffic going down that staircase, the overwhelming majority of people would not have actually been aware that they were being subject to this LFR trial. I didn't see a single person other than myself pausing to read the signs.Edit: There also wasn't a single sign inside the gateline where you'd tap out and walk into the area that the camera station was pointing at. I asked the police why this was, and they claimed it was because the cameras are only positioned to capture people entering the station, not exiting. Maybe that's true, as long as you don't turn around at any point? I'm not convinced.
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  codedokode
  I noticed that in my country delivery couriers on e-bikes sometimes cover their face completely, with a balaclava and a ski mask. They ride at high speeds around pedestrians, break all traffic rules and obviously they prefer to opt out from facial recognition.Maybe we should start wearing masks in public too. There is no upsides in going around with an open face.
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  _fw
  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 surprised as though THIS is the nail in the coffin of untracked movement across the city. As others have said, we’ve always been tracked. This is just them being open about their latest methods.I hope this serves as a warning for citizens elsewhere: this is a slope that governments will only slide down further. There is no coming back from this in the UK.Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.Any weapons can and will be utilised against a perceived enemy. When that perceived enemy becomes /you/, you should expect these things to be used against you.History has taught us that before.We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.
• incognos
  And this is how new makeup trends will get started to fool the facial recognition
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  hn_submit
  Britain is the original Orwellian society!!They even practice DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink in Blighty, especially in government and parliamentary circles.
• dipierro
  This did not end well for freedom in Russia (see Moscow underground face recognition tech targeting dissidents). This will not end well for democracy in Europe.
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  freakynit
  The issue with all this surveillance is that it always ends up with suppression of dissent and silencing of opposition by abusing enforcement agencies.All such surveillance should start with 24-hour live video feed of private lives of all politicians... they carry immense power and control, and thus, warrant an equally powerful monitoring and scrutiny compared to common people.
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  cedws
  The surveillance of China without the prosperity or safety. At least in China I can leave my bag or laptop out of sight for a moment, same cannot be said of my home city of London. What good is all of this when hard criminals are let out of prison after 6 months. Clown country.
• budududuroiu
  Not surprised by this move, the UK is preparing to silence dissent, for a very simple reason: tough times ahead. Guardian reported yesterday the UK might face food shortages, their young are increasingly burdened with supporting the triple lock through their taxes, and people are making exit plans rathert than be milked for their hard work.
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  type0
  The hubris for surveillance in UK is staggering, what will they do next - roll out the social score system so you'll be banned from taking the tube if you express too much non sanctioned thoughts online?
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  Traster
  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 be used to identify, infiltrate and disrupt the numerous peaceful protests that the police aren't keen on in London.
• danw1979
  Putting aside the social and legal implications of this trial, I find it very interesting how projects like this are often trumpeted to be successful and celebrated at launch (rather than when proven to work, or save costs or whatever) as though the hard bit was actually wading for months or years through several government and private IT bureaucracies, not making a system that delivers what it promises.
• rtpg
  Like 10 years ago I realized that facial recognition research was basically on the same level as weapons research, if not worse. So many nefarious usages.Every researcher and product designer who leaned into this just has helped speedrun the world into a nasty place. But I guess I don’t have to type my passcode into my phone anymore!
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  rob74
  > People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available and images of anyone not on the authorised database will be deleted immediately and permanently.So, massive invasion of privacy, but will only catch stupid criminals (and unsuspecting people who happen to have a strong resemblance with a criminal in the database?).
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  proc0
  21st century authoritarianism. Humans learned nothing from the 20th century.
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  smurda
  The UK already has so much CCTV. Some believe it reduces drug-related, vehicle, and property crime, but most agree is has virtually no effect on violent crime (https://www.college.police.uk/research/crime-reduction-toolk...).Even if this initiative is effective at reducing crime, I don't want to lose privacy or see a chilling effect in society where people are afraid because they know they're being watched.
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  batrat
  I don't mind it. I work in the same field and people don't want to work in government institutions anymore, there are less and less kids in police/military schools. Cameras allow officers to stop patrolling and do more preventive work, focus on hard cases, etc. In a relative small city we manage 500+ cameras and more are added every day. The problem is storage and finding people to monitor them. My only issue is getting it in hands of some crazy dictator, but that is another story.
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  spacebanana7
  “Our deployments are intelligence-led and focused on identifying people wanted by the police or courts, including those suspected of serious offences and those who may be breaching bail conditions or court orders”This is crazy. Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.
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  pluc
  Just gonna drop this here for no particular reasonhttps://urban-privacy.com/pages/anti-surveillance-clothing
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  bobim
  Brazil was so right. We're just an inference away from being jailed. I'm not from UK but it shows how we are all helpless and see in plain conciousness what is coming. When did we lost the grip?
• 023847292847
  How thoughtful. This way the Metro Police know where to find you if some intimidation is due after you questioned the legitimacy of claims made by regime-aligned scholars such as Professor Jason Arday, Ph.D., who ran 600 miles in 6 days and 30 marathons in 35 days.Such wrongthink can't go unpunished.
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  Schiendelman
  They weren't? That's more surprising given the UK surveillance state.
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  coldtea
  Lest they commit the offense of buying a baseball bat or being stabbed?
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  cagz
  It is BTP, not London Underground, they are not the same thing.
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  azalemeth
  I've often wondered what would happen if you took some near IR, eye safe, ultra bright LEDs and strobed them at 60 Hz from your headgear in an omnidirectional fashion, pointing away from your body and avoiding nearby floor reflections. You'd stick out like a sore thumb (which I wouldn't mind, as I'm not a criminal nor doing anything wrong!) but it would be enough to likely "opt out" of facial recognition via dint of blinding the camera in the vicinity of your face.Britain has all sorts of laws like "attempting to pervert the course of justice", so you'd have to be very careful to not accidentally cover for a "real criminal", but just to preserve privacy it might work (especially if more than one person did so).I've never had the guts to do it, but I do really hate facial recognition and all of this surveillance capitalism.
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  samaltmanfried
  Good news! That means they're going to solve all that street crime, right?
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  Cider9986
  Ya got a loisence for that face, mate?
• larodi
  What if I wear adversarial makeup which fucks up my facial vectors ?
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  hollow-moe
  can't wait for these to normalize https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cyberpunk+oni+mask&iar=images
• dtnm
  Binface is safe.
• andy_ppp
  I have it on good authority they have been doing this for years, maybe this is just an increase to inside the station or maybe just a good time to normalise this…
• deepmem
  seems like something positive thing is happening in UK.
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  kypro
  For what it's worth, as a Brit, I assure you no one cares about this, and it's likely that most people, if asked, would support it.The UK doesn't value liberty for liberty's sake like the US does. In the US there seems to be this notion that freedom is a universal good, where as in the UK people are quite comfortable with liberties being revoked if it means they feel safer or fewer people are doing things they don't like.UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next – loud fireworks, energy drinks, smoking, gambling, porn, not wearing headphones on public transport, praying for people having abortions, etc.While this tech will obviously be used to clamp down on protests that are inconvenient to the government (as we've seen happen with protests in recent UK history), even these measures tend to be popular in the UK. Most protest groups are net-unpopular, therefore any movement the government makes to crack down on say Palestine protests, climate protests or immigration protests, are fairly popular here.Imo the UK was accidentally a liberal country post-WWII to the early 1990s because of influence from the US, but culturally the UK isn't liberal and never was. We're a very socially conservative country and take a natural dislike to anyone who rocks the boat a little.These new digital surveillance techniques are very much in line with British cultural conservatism, and follow a long history of UK mass surveillance.As a Brit who inhabits the US desire for freedom I genuinely struggle to relate to Brits and it always makes me feel less insane when I come on here and find other people who value liberty too. But in my real life, I think I've genuinely only ever met one Brit who has shared my desire for freedom.
• WhereIsTheTruth
  The UK spent years denouncing China for scanning their own citizens faces in public, to finally do it themselvesThey became the very thing they called the enemy of their own citizensThe irony..Begs the question: what's next?
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  retube
  Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?Comments here seem like an ideological kneejerk response.
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  Levitating
  I don't see how this is any different from how traffic cameras are used. Hot take, but as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal.
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  i_am_a_peasant
  I’ve used the London underground. I wouldn’t let my kids go on it alone. I welcome this tbh. I don’t see what else they’re supposed to do other than have permanent guards on every wagon and every corner 24/7
• strong-self
  police have been running facial recognition at london protests for years already. so is this just making it official?
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  yearesadpeople
  It's the usual responses isn't it: _'I'm saddened'_ or, _'what has happened to Britain'_. Had a look at America, Russia, or Belarus, etc.?Living in the UK is fantastic.
• nphardon
  Erich Mielke smiles from his grave.
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  Oarch
  How will this handle face masks? Hijabs or Niqabs?
• Simulacra
  Technology that began in the private sector, retailers using facial recognition technology to profile customers, has now bled over violently into public life. I strongly believe in the right to be forgotten, and I strongly believe in the right to be peacefully invisible. No flock cameras. No facial recognition cameras. The intrusion and dangers are too great against any benefit.It's only a matter of time until government forces a social credit score upon all of us back by these cameras.
• chrisjj
  > People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes availableLooking forward to seeing the singnage there.
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  HelloUsername
  Not really related to the written topic of this page, but I noticed there is a sideways red button with "Leave this site" that redirects you to 'https://www.google.co.uk/'. What could be the incentive behind this? Why not just close the tab?
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  Retr0id
  This must be especially inconvenient for those with criminal physiognomy.
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  nphardon
  mask up.
• danw1979
  > People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes availableSo what is the point ?
• 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.
• basisword
  To be honest I don't see the point. Anyone committing a crime goes around in a balaclava these days so facial recognition won't be much use. They'd have much more success just banning face coverings and there would be plenty of support for it.The problems we have are much deeper though. Petty crime is out of control and it's impacting society in obvious ways. Just go to a shop to see the measures they have to take to try to reduce theft. We don't have enough police due to a decade or two of underfunding. And even if we did we don't have enough prison space to even let harder criminals finish out their sentences - so what's the point in arresting petty criminals?Saying that London is still one of the safest major cities in the world. Safer than any major US city. I've been living here a long time and the worst I've seen is a few phone thefts. I can walk pretty much anywhere safely at any time of the day or night. Don't let the fear mongering online fool you.
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  miroljub
  In Beijing underground doesn't scan people's faces.They also don't arrest for internet memes.Just saying.
• surcap526
  [dead]
• PunchyHamster
  [flagged]
• DarkmSparks
  Fascist monarchy has facist policies shocker. So glad I left that hell hole.
• RedShift1
  Oi, you have a loicense for that mate?
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  ExoticPearTree
  The way things keep devolving in Britain, the easiest path is to force everyone to wear a camera on their chest like the police do. Then you can arrest people who don't wear them because surely they have something to hide.
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  heyitsmedotjayb
  If it helps stop antisemitism then i'm all for it
• throwawaypath
  Wouldn't want some bloke getting away on the London Underground after blaspheming Islam.