That's why it's called "erosion of rights" and not "outright nullification of rights". Unfortunately, it works, and it's entirely unsurprising that face surveillance will become normalized.
125 - 135 from: https://www.josharcher.uk/static/files/2018/01/Industrial_So....
> It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises.
> A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on ... In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.
> While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable.
> Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation.
> No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology. History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually. But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given civilization.
Protesting against something takes a lot of energy, and inconveniencing you only a little (or very much but extremely rarely) doesn't make most people's list of priorities.
Full disclosure: I'm a gun owner. But I'd swap the second amendment for a data privacy amendment in a heartbeat.
You see this in the US. Boston, DC, New York, etc are littered with surveillance cameras and ALPRs. Once it's normalized they'll roll it out to places like New Bedford, Norlfolk and Buffalo and all the other places where the government (as an organization, not as individuals) feels its respected less.
I’m not clicking with this theory. I think it’s in cities that are more multicultural and thus have more hostility.
The government can get away with a lot when the people are frustrated about something else.
Would private face recognition be banned too? Very soon a CCTV setup without face recognition will be out of date.
Computer vision-ey stuff is maturing and the list of "trivial" is getting long. It'll probably be implemented in most camera applications. Face recognition, object recognition, all manner of classification.
Once your phone organizes and hyperlinks photos this way, it'll seem weird to deny police.
I'm not denying there're major rights issues associated with this, just that the technology is set to become so ambient.
You need a populace that overwhelmingly believes it is not ok for the government to operate a surveillance dragnet. Then the politicians will do that. The only reason the government doesn't go full Waco on people who haven't paid their parking tickets is because the overwhelming majority of society don't tolerate that. This is also why it's important to not let this kind of crap be legitimized in the public's mind.
Unfortunately it looks like that ship as long since sailed as far as a damp rock off the coast of France is concerned. With all the crap that's being dredged up as a result of Brexit there's still hope for the Irish saying they see what Britain has and they don't want any.
Concerts and other closed events routinely have as a condition for attendance that you consent to have your photo taken.
True, but you can't erode something ad infinitum; eventually it will disappear.
* People are losing their freedom of privacy in the name of safety and most accept it. Many are likely unaware at this stage of the trade-off.
* One activist was in presence by happen chance, otherwise this likely would have gone unreported.
* The database _currently_ only keeps peoples data for 30 days. When the UK leaves the EU, this will likely be extended. China has already experienced multiple data breaches.
* It's unclear what data is kept and deleted, I suspect that metadata may be retained indefinitely.
* The money being spent on these systems could be spent getting more officers on the ground. I have no doubt they are sinking millions of pounds into this project.
* The police initially started testing this system illegally, there were no repercussions.
* The majority of people being arrested as a result of this technology are probably not the worst people in society. I believe this will be used to disproportionately target poorer people and petty crimes.
* Telling an officer to "fuck off" or "piss off" is not a crime. It's not an offense to be rude and you certainly shouldn't have to "Wind your neck in" in fear of a public servant.
> The force had put out a statement saying “anyone who declines to be scanned will not necessarily be viewed as suspicious”. However, witnesses said several people were stopped after covering their faces or pulling up hoods.
> “The guy told them to p* off and then they gave him the £90 public order fine for swearing,” Ms Carlo added. “He was really angry.”
I live close to Romford, and I'm quite tempted to wander past with my face obscured and then politely decline if asked to be photographed.
Of course, I'm white, middle class and middle aged, so I probably wont be stopped.
One of the major issues with UK law is it's vagueness and openness to interpretation, which is all of course by design. You don't tend to notice erosion until the ground beneath you collapses.
Scenario 1: You get fined if you refuse to expose your face.
Scenario 2: You get fined if you refuse to expose your face, and are rude about it.
I don't see how scenario 2 is worse than scenario 1: it seems obviously less bad. Now, maybe in fact it's
Scenario 1: You get fined if you refuse to expose your face.
Scenario 3: You get fined if you're rude to the police.
This comparison is more debatable, but I still prefer 3 to 1, because not exposing your face is a thing that has (so to speak) possible functional uses, so if you can't do it then you've lost something that could actually be useful to you, whereas being rude to the police -- which, for the avoidance of doubt, I do think people should be free to do -- isn't really something anyone has a particular need to do.
Again, I can understand why someone might prefer 1 to 3. But if my civil liberties are going to be gratuitously eroded, I'd prefer to lose ones whose value is only symbolic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/makeu...
We don't do this en masse now because "The very thing that makes you invisible to computers makes you glaringly obvious to other humans"
Or laser dazzlers that look for lenses. Both will probably be quickly banned as criminal tools (like 'hacking tools' are in some nations).
You could also project time-dependent illumination patterns on your own face, throwing off algorithms.
We just need one of the Kardashians to make it fashionable and then it's all over for face detection.
Any more information on this from a better source than the DM?
“Live Facial Recognition uses NEC’s NeoFace technology to analyse images of the faces of people on the watch list. It measures the structure of each face, including distance between eyes, nose, mouth and jaw to create facial data.
The system detects a face, creates a digital version of it and searches it against the watch list; where it makes a match it sends an alert to an officer on the scene.
The officer compares the camera image and the watch list image and decides whether to stop and speak to the person. We always explain why we’ve stopped someone; we also give them a leaflet that explains how they can contact us to ask any questions afterwards.
The system will only keep faces matching the watch list, these are kept for 30 days, all others are deleted immediately. We delete all other data on the watch list and the footage we record.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFyBpcbH9A
They give stats and details.
It may not be the same incident as the OP, but it sounds broadly similar and the programme fleshes out the general situation well.
Edit: Actually it is the same guy. The issue and provision of the fine, etc., it's on the show.
Don't want to get stuck in that news bubble though....
Jesus, it's a good thing cops in London don't have guns. Can't imagine how this would have ended in one of the whitebread suburbs here in the US with our 'roided-out school-yard-bullies-turned-pro.
It so weird how much of our freedom and privacy we are giving away. People used to fight for these stuff.
And then you would think how far this can go in near future if this is just the beginning.
After all, all these fear and mixed feelings about security and conflicts are caused by a long chain of reactions and consequences of bad decisions governments are making themselves around the world. And it is sad that normal people end up losing their privacy more than responsible ones do.
It requires a fundamental strategy change that is not going to happen in reality. I wonder what kind of destructive side effects it will have for the future generations specially to the culture.
"Camera cross-checked photos of faces of passers-by against wanted database. One man covered face before officers stopped him and took his picture anyway. He was fined £90 at scene in Romford by police who arrested three other people Police say they know of human rights concerns but want to make London safer"
(Adding a link to a news source from the other side of the aisle to the Mail.)
It would be nice to be safer from police harassment.
By the police stopping you, taking your picture, and trying to match your face to a list of criminals with 96% of false positive match rate.
I assume that these folks have warrants. But I am not aware of any deployed facial recognition in Portland.
It's a nice idea but it would allow lots of law breaking of things worked that way. Eg paint something on your car, now police can't capture you on speed camera!!11one.
Way things are going, how long until we have camera technology as CCTV that is comparable to Holywood camera's - certainly the standard today is up there with 80's offering.
Might even come a time when you can do a film in places like London without needing any cameras as you can just ab-use the data protection act to get copies of any footage your in and get all the camera angles and video you need to edit into a film. Kinda doable now, though not all cameras are 4k and well light area's. But certainly doable.
One interesting legal aspect about CCTV in the UK - the only camera's that are allowed to record audio are the ones located outside police stations. Which is reassuring as with mic-arrays - intrusion into privacy and indeed voice recognition would be far greater than any CCTV/facial recognition. But that is one to watch and keep an eye upon as I'm sure that will change/erode over time.
You can only do that if the lawmakers agree.
If you want absolute privacy, than stay at home.
If you want absolute freedom, than go live somewhere where nobody else lives.
Society runs on compromises: your freedon to swing your fist ends where my nose begins (and viceversa); your privacy ends where my safety is concerned (and viceversa).
If you want privacy, then don’t post online.
If you don't agree with them, democracies give you the means to start a public discussion. But, in the meanwhile, you comply. That is civilization!
Do you know that idiocy of sovereign citizens? Well, London police demontrated that none of that bullshit will be tolerated. And, while I personally dislike being continuosly filmed, I think that London police has just made London a better place to live.
London city is not the wild west.
Yes it is: From the Public Order Act 1986 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64)
A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—
(a)uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_5_Public_Order_Act_198...
This is largely true but
> It's not an offense to be rude
is rightly or wrongly a very broad grey area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_5_Public_Order_Act_198...
This is a common use of laws in the United Kingdom. They put lots of laws on the books around trivial things that they almost never enforce on their own, but then which officers arbitrarily use in "convenient" situations like this. The average person swearing in the street will not be accosted, someone arguing with a cop who wants to make a point will.
Which whatever their intention became a useful 'we don't like your face' tool.
My default position is 'explain why you want these powers with evidence they are nescessary' unfortunately the average person here doesn't pay any attention, which is why we are one of the most heavily surveiled democracies in the world.
Accepting such a fine is voluntary, he could go to court and defend himself instead. I'd be surprised if some organisation or another didn't offer to pay his costs?
What society needs is genetic engineering to ensure no more micro dick, low IQ, braindead thugs are born into the world to play grown-up wunnabe nazis.
They must have grounds to suspect they will find what they are looking for.
Alrighty then, just wanted to make sure that they know of human rights concerns.
Not quite stylometric analysis, but I think that's an interesting angle of the story.
I hope they totally screw it up and touch off the kind of "civil unrest" that you need in order to remind the government that people have rights.
People will feel directly threatened if these systems produce too many false positives which result in too many false arrests or "police harassment".
Government and vendors will get away with it by slowly and sporadically deploying these systems until "we" get used to being monitored by these "AI" type systems.
Mildly "sexy" news like this is perfect for letting the people gently feel aware that they are being monitored in this way without being too threatening.
The last thing authorities or vendors want is news that 250 <insert-triggering-ethic-minority> were falsely apprehended because of AI identification with a few citizens getting chased and "accidentally" shot in the process => That would be inescapable-incompetence compounding incompetence after all, reason to take to the streets.
> your privacy ends where my safety is concerned
and I dispute both the premise and that this is a legitimate instance of it.
Modern liberal democracies have until pretty recently come down strongly on the side of privacy. For the most part, in such societies, detaining people and making them answer questions or identify themselves has required significant objective evidence to suspect them of wrongdoing. Searches require stronger evidence, and often judicial oversight. Surveillance dragnets have traditionally been forbidden or strictly limited. In short, people have only been expected to give up privacy in the name of safety under narrow circumstances.
What the police are doing with facial recognition in the UK is anything but narrow. Nobody has made a good case for circumstances in the UK being so dire as to demand people be unable to walk down public streets in near-anonymity.
They also fail to realize that the 2A already failed, and that it's premise wasn't that gun ownership protected against a tyrannical government. It's that gun ownership was necessary to the militia-based security posture which was the alternative to relying on a powerful standing military and armed police forces for external and internal security, and that preventing the creation and reliance on those large standing forces in the first place was the safeguard against tyranny.
In practice, that would be a bad trade, because you can verify that you still have your 2A rights by being in possession of a gun, whereas with data privacy, all you have are solemn assurances that your rights are being respected, and when you discover you were lied to and you didn't actually have data privacy after all, you've got nothing.
If you mean some sort of impossibly-strong, enforced-by-God-or-aliens data privacy amendment, maybe. But that's not on the table.
(My point here is independent of the question of the 2A itself, but just looking at it as the proposed trade. Trading something concretely verifiable for promises that the promising people have every motivation to break secretly and you have no ability to audit is a bad trade.)
Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.
There was a comment I read on another thread about some one who bought about 20 pressure cookers when they were accidentally marked down for a dollar apiece and had the police called on him. Is that really okay? I have also heard that the FBI is notified if you buy more than a certain quantity of fertilizer.
Can a Brit enlighten me as to if there are similar protections or justifications against this technology in England?
As mentioned in another comment, this is the gradual erosion. They say "we want to compromise", get some ground, then push more and "compromise" again to push the line further. Trading liberty for security is a risky game.
I'm not even sure it matters any longer; have you ever tried to find ammonium nitrate based fertilizer at your typical big-box store?
It's pretty much unobtainable unless you're a farmer.
>There's no downside for the wealthy with this tech,
Wealthy people break petty laws (the kind of stuff these systems make it possible to crack down on) all the time. There's a reason you never see the cops running a DUI dragnet at the rich people boat ramp. The wealthy do not want to be subject to surveillance dragnets because while many people can pull strings to get out of trouble very, very, very few people can afford to pull string with the regularity that would be required if the rich were subject to a police state.
Just look at how many people consider the existence of the TSA normal now.
How does this translate into practicalities? What laws do I want Westminster or London Assembly to enact?
The point I was making earlier is that the distinction between dragnet and regular policing is eroding, as this technology becomes widespread.
Presumably it's ok for police to stand at the station and look out for their man, or ask to look at a store's CCTV. We'll... That kind of thing is becoming mediated by software. Upload your CCTV photo to the app, and it finds matches with your target, or multiple targets, or everyone.
To put it in US terms, in the 2016 Democratic primary we saw attack ads criticizing Hillary for being a hawk. They'd say things like "she says she supports not getting involved in Quagmire:latest but in $YEAR she voted for a bill that funded $ThingThatDoesTheOpposite".
When we see city and state politicians getting called out in the same manner for pandering to the interests (mostly police and government) that want a police state then we're on the right track.
I don't know exactly how this translates to practicalities. I'd support politicians who have a strong message of getting the .gov out of people's business in specific cases in the hope it eventually generalizes.
I think (in London at least), there are so many cameras that we have no idea which ones just record and which have facial recognition capabilities.For all I know, when I come out Waterloo Tube Station into the rail station, the camera at the top of the escalator could be face-id'ing me.
If the police stand there pointing a camera at me, I'll naturally be suspicious, and yes, defensive.
Interesting question though.
(+) Yes I know this isn't exactly the same
No, you won’t. The burqa is extremely rare in Western Europe. This is pointed out whenever political parties propose a burqa ban: a country would be banning something that isn’t even a significant thing there. IIRC, the total number of burqa wearers in all of France, for example, does not exceed 300.
As for niqabs, you do see one from time to time, but they certainly aren’t common against the total Muslim population, and when you do, it may be that the wearers are visitors from e.g. the Gulf states and not locals.
https://www.gov.uk/police-powers-to-stop-and-search-your-rig...
> You can only be stopped and searched without reasonable grounds if it has been approved by a senior police officer.
This can happen if it is suspected that:
serious violence could take place
you’re carrying a weapon or have used one
you’re in a specific location or areaAre the specific locations this applies to defined in law, or can a senior police officer just say "this neighborhood has a lot of criminals; search everyone"?
[1] - https://twitter.com/brumpolice/status/1100765101156634624
Do you really think we ought to have a society in which no one can leave his house without his dog tag?
The UK wrote their implementation of gdpr into UK law: general data protection act 2018. It's the law unless parliament changes it, Brexit or no Brexit.
Most people are too busy to even acknowledge these issues. When you're barely able to financially take care of your family or when you're too deep in the consumerism game you don't have time for these high level questions.
People are more outraged about the latest episode of Game of Thrones than they will ever be about the current state of humanity and its impact on Nature, the erosion of privacy and freedom, &c.
I feel ask though it's more that our systems became so complex that no one, let alone the lay in that specific tech, are even capable of understanding the consequences and what we're loosing.
It's not unreasonable for a lay person to be told about facial recognition and think "well, it's just doing a better job than what a cop would have done anyway" without realizing that it often does worse than a cop statistically and that unlike a cop, all the cameras can be coordinated so that your movements are stored indefinitely and viewable by anyone, something that couldn't happen when a person was looking at people on their beat.
Ditto with online tracking, it's the extent of the ramifications that people don't think/know about. Even then, there are no alternatives that provide the simplicity of communication that Facebook does, so even after something like Cambridge Analytica, most people don't really have options to move away from without completely changing how they socialize, and to be honest, most people don't understand just how much information they leak even still.
This 100%. Living deep in flyover country, I have heard the sentence in your second paragraph from several people.
And do you know who I blame?
Creators and marketers of AI/ML. People on this site are included in that list.
They are being lauded as the saviors of humanity. Think of all we can learn and do with AI/ML. Nevermind that they're just sufficiently large datasets with sufficiently complicated math problems. Also nevermind where that data is coming from or what it contains.
You won't have to worry about online shopping, because we'll be able to get you your stuff faster! Isn't that great?!
In flyover country, deep in flyover country, away from huge cities, away from tech, people do not understand what data is out there about them and what is being done with it. That is the biggest problem with all of this. They literally don't understand why it's a problem, let alone the nuance of the problems.
Throughout recorded history, people have usually been "ruled" by some form of king, warrior, aristocracy, etc. But it's not like one leader could really hurt or kill every single person in a large society, so the people as a collective shouldn't really need to follow his orders. So why do they?
The simplest answer is, there are a series of trade-offs made when following a leader (or government). You have less autonomy, but you may gain some benefits, such as security, order, direction, and the possibility that they might accomplish some of your wishes. Of course, if the leader controls an army, you could say fear is a big motivator to follow their wishes, but then why does the army follow the leader? Same thing: security, order, direction, accomplishment of wishes, etc.
We all make tradeoffs to live in a society. The loss of most freedoms isn't actually a huge impact to your ability to live your life; even in a highly repressive society, you can still eat, sleep, socialize, which is all most animals need. The idea that your society might be secretly abusing its citizens is troubling, but it's not as bad as, say, a food shortage, or waves of crime. So on the whole, mass surveillance is a minor inconvenience, and not something worth flooding to the polls (or storming the gates).
Fear. Why do people think it is unsafe to walk outside when statistics show us we have never been safer? Why are people afraid of public places when crime is far more likely to happen in the home?
Don't get me wrong, you have all the reasons to fear these things if you live where these things happen, but I'd bet my left hand that most people in 1st world countries ever witness any kind of serious violence.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fortress-America-Embraced-Abandoned-D...
Now you are asking for not just good nature or enlightenment, but for something more... moral courage.
The sad part is the people who are will be lost forever as we march this ugly walk into the Grest Filters which consciousness seems to tend to do to itself.
The only way to get something like moral courage from the masses is to spread ideas into people's minds the same way religious leaders or propagandists do. People love crusaded and want to be important so will become a part of them.
Put more succinctly: It is the full time job of law enforcement to use these tools to solve crimes. Even if literally everyone protests them next month, if you wait 10 years, people will have moved on with their lives, and it will be implemented anyway.
Here is a concrete example:
Back in high school, a holocaust survivor visited our class. We were told the fundamental difference between the US and Nazi germany was that in the US, you could travel without carrying papers (which meant that people could keep the inevitable failings of democracy in check, since privacy while traveling and meeting people basically implies freedom of assembly and press).
That difference no longer exists in the US in any practical way because technology has obsoleted the legal mechanism of “you can’t ask for my drivers license without probable cause”.
Are you sure this is quite as absolute and one-way as you’re saying here? ID isn’t required by government to be driven, use public transport, fly on private aircraft, use boats, etc. Sure as a practical matter in the US non-car options are not nearly as powerful as in most first world countries, but that’s not a matter of law. And while technology helped create the current state of affairs, it can disrupt it too. The motivation for drivers licenses is a real one of public safety. If self-driving cars mean most people cease manual driving though, the need for licenses will cease as well (and also most of the typical suspicions and justifications police use to pull over a car). That may result in a significant clawback of travel privacy in some respects. Practical is not always the equivalent of legal long term is it?
If the true purpose of a drivers license was public safety there are surely a large number of people who wouldn't be permitted to operate a motor vehicle. Or at the very least we would be required to periodically prove our competency.
The press sold us out. They rolled up, told us they were the forth estate. People are busy so they outsourced their critical thinking about government to experts. The press then proceed to not give half a shit about civics.
https://www.novinite.com/media/inpictures/201003/photo_veryb...
That's silly. Driving in America at least is a quasi-right: while not technically a right by law, as things stand the economy and much of society in the country would collapse if most adults were not able to drive. But at the same time driving is not natural and definitely represents real danger. So the law reflects a balance between these two competing interests, with safety concerns slowly getting pushed harder over time. Driving requirements are relatively forgiving, and removal is taken seriously. But there are a lot of laws and thinking around how to improve safety. The licensing process has become more of a ramp too, with many (all?) states having increasingly graduated licensing and some starting to have rechecks needed for the elderly. Licensing for non-necessity driving (commercial vehicles, motorbikes etc) sees a significant spike in requirements.
People very much care. In highschool I had a good friend hit and killed by a drunk driver while they were walking right near school, and I would strongly resent any putting down of how devastating that was for the family and our group. But "individualized mechanized arbitrary point to point transportation" is also very much critical, and with current technology that means "a human driving". It's very unfairly glib to impugn that society isn't trying to balance here. What is needed to radically change the status quo is to finish the car technology so that a human is not needed. Once that is the case and manual driving becomes a fun luxury I expect we'll see licensing requirements and training increase a great deal, looking more like what professional motor racers do. The converse from a privacy perspective is that no, many people will not bother to carry drivers licenses with them anymore, nor will they need to.
Generalized authentication is and should be an important role of government, so some form of ID will still matter. But in terms of needing to have it on you? No, I do not think that legal requirements around that will change. The "true purpose" of a drivers license is in fact trying to have some minimum level of competence and personal responsibility attached to the act of personally controlling a multi-ton pile of metal moving at high speeds.
