
Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance - _ao789
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/linkuk-bt-google-free-wifi-and-calls-london
======
Animats
_Sure the West and China are both turning into biometric dystopias buuuuuuuut
ours delivers fried chicken to your train seat._ \- Naomi Wu, Shenzhen.

For some railroad lines in China, you can order food while on a train and have
it delivered to you at a station. That requires finding the passenger quickly,
so some combination of cell phone tracking and face recognition is used.[1]
KFC is using this system.

China's approach to Big Brother is more like a service function. The
Government knows who you are and what you're doing, but China has been like
that for centuries. There's no tradition of anonymity. The older paper-based
systems worked when people didn't move much. The newer technology is being
used to provide routine services, such as convenience store checkout and
finding purse snatchers.

London has a lot of cameras, but many of them are old, so they have poor
resolution. Newer 4K surveillance cameras [2] finally have enough resolution
to be useful for recognizing faces at 40 feet or so.

[1]
[http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-07/13/content_300925...](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-07/13/content_30092586.htm)
[2] [https://www.lorextechnology.com/articles/What-
is-4k-Video/R-...](https://www.lorextechnology.com/articles/What-
is-4k-Video/R-sc16000060)

------
HenryBemis
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 have it.

What harm can 3 more cameras can do? :) (per kiosk, per street)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_Kingdom)

~~~
gaius
_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 driven in that
evening, I'm sure the guy walked around all the local streets pushing the
button and seeing if any cars lit up. That was the most annoying thing to get
the car re-coded, I easily bricked all the devices and cancelled the cards, no
activity was detected on them. Insurance replaced them. No idea what he wanted
with or did with the pesos.

Anyway, the thief was caught on several CCTV cameras, should have been an easy
job for the popo to pick him up, but actually, CCTV footage is next to
useless. All you could tell was that he was 6-ish feet tall and approximate
ethnicity. So I don't mind the pervasive surveillance, because _it doesn 't
work anyway_. I guess I am vaguely annoyed that taxpayer's money is wasted on
any of it deployed by the government, but that's all. Maybe it at least has
some deterrent effect, but this guy clearly wasn't bothered by being caught on
camera at all, so probably not.

~~~
icc97
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.

~~~
mhb
_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 becomes increasingly active as it tries to
escape, and eventually jumps out if the container allows it"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog)

~~~
eeereerews
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.

~~~
yesenadam
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."

------
KirinDave
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 systems and techniques are good enough that obscurity
is increasingly becoming unreachable (even by design), we need to come to
terms with what that really means.

It feels like a big loss, but every time I sit down to analyze what we've
really lost, I never can identify anything actually valuable to me in contrast
to the privacy rights that we already struggle to maintain.

But also, a consequence of a networked society is that people can cooperate to
create systems that have remarkably disproportionate collecting capacity. In
the same sense that the consequence of an industrialized society is that
people can cooperate to create disproportionate manufacturing capacity. No
amount of rules, conservative independence, liberal appeal, or public outcry
can change that fundamental truth. Nor can we undo the march of technology
without a fundamentally cataclysmic restructuring of the world's economy.

~~~
ppod
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 all citizens while remaining hidden themselves.
Correctly implemented, technological tracking of services and employees and
bureaucrats has the potential to be much more like true transparency, with
everyone having a more accurate picture of everyone else's history of
behaviour.

Whether you think that this is desirable or not is really about values and
preferences, not an objective question. But I think it is objectively likely
that a society like this would enjoy a competitive advantage in terms of
organising its economy and society.

~~~
pasabagi
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.

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

~~~
KirinDave
There is no such thing and I submit to you that there can be no such thing
without adopting of a more feudal model of society.

------
Theodores
I don't know if these phone boxes will last for long, there have been plenty
of efforts to repurpose them for free wifi, maps, local council services and
so on but these experiments never last for that long.

The fundamental problem is the guy with the iPhone X has a contract for lots
of 4G bandwidth and would prefer to just use that except for at home/work when
the wifi gets used.

So you are left with customers for the service that have pay as you go SIM
only contracts for an old iPhone 4S.

~~~
jstanley
Why is the guy with an iPhone X a more desirable customer than a guy with an
iPhone 4S?

~~~
Spooky23
People who spend a grand on a phone tend to buy other things.

~~~
rco8786
...but the product is free WiFi.

~~~
tinbucket
I think the real product is the data of the person using the 'free' WiFi. The
WiFi is a service designed to gain access to that product. In that instance,
the data of someone spending £1,000 on a phone is more valuable than the data
of someone using a PAYG iPhone 4S.

------
lokopodium
Mac address randomization is a must if your wifi is on in public (you don't
even need to connect anywhere to be fingerprinted and tracked). Also use
cookie self-destruct plugins for your browser.

~~~
myopicgoat
MAC address randomisation has been proven to be essentially useless:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.02874v1](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.02874v1)

~~~
goblins
Having read just the abstract is seems that current implementations of Mac
address randomisation is essentially useless rather the Mac address
randomisation itself.

Hopefully in the future the implementation will improve. Until then WiFi is
off.

~~~
y4mi
Youre still being tracked by your phone service provider though.

~~~
goblins
Only as far as it goes. Tracking isn't as fine grained. Service providers main
concern is the service. Can you be tracked this way? Yes, but not as easily as
this is talking about

------
Reason077
These are based on the LinkNYC kiosks in New York which date back to 2015 or
so. The hardware looks exactly the same.

------
walshemj
Ah yet another attempt to keep the payphones division alive whilst I can feel
sympathy for those stuck in payphones as a share holder of BT.A I do ask is
this actually going to turn a profit.

------
slackuser
Sorry, but can somebody give a full explanation why is it so bad? And if you
want want you can just not to use this kiosks, right?

~~~
HenryBemis
I have an issue, when e.g. Argos is using my phone's wifi antenna (even when
I'm not connected to their network) to track where do I walk within their
stores.

I do accept the fact that any cell signal provider can also track my movements
since I am using their antennas.

I do perfectly understand that the STATE (law, justice, etc.) can also track
my movements, and does so, using due process (I hope). But a private
corporate, to be seeing where do I walk, what do I use, for me it is a
problem.

In the same spirit Google was slapped by openly tracking every WiFi signal
their cars intercepted. What if I don't want MY home wifi, or MY phone's wifi
be a tool for THEM to make billions? Why do I need to be a product for their
greed?

~~~
grkvlt
OK, would you have a problem with Argos using CCTV to track you via ML that
identifies different individuals and records their path through the store?
What about CCTV that is displayed on a monitor and a minimum wage drone views,
and records people's paths through the store manually? The outcome is the same
in all three cases - Argos has data about how individuals are using their
property, and can use that data for whatever purpose, probably making the
stores more efficient and increasing profits. You can always wear several
different masks and keep changing your clothes as you walk around a shop if
you're worried bout being tracked, or maybe just don't shop there?

~~~
around_here
The "don't go there" answers only hold true if there are actual alternatives.

It's a shit argument, and collusion to monitor and track customers is pretty
much universal.

~~~
grkvlt
My point is that private companies are perfectly within their rights to track
you on their own property, whether by computer or manually, and if you have a
problem with it your _only_ recourse is to avoid those companies. I have zero
problem with a supermarket using my presence to improve the layout of their
store, and to be honest, zero problem with Google tracking my phone's presence
there to produce those useful 'when is this location busy' bar charts on their
search results - it's helpful to me, and others, and free!

------
icc97
This level of surveillance is a shame given that by luck of never being
invaded by the Nazis there's no ID cards in the UK. Somehow also people
managed to stop attempts to get ID cards introduced.

It might even be because of this. That is, it's easy for other European
governments to track people as they have to carry ID at all times. Because the
UK government are worried about the lack of this, they go down the CCTV route.

~~~
bayerrr
As a German, you could not be more wrong with your idea about ID cards. ID
cards are not used to track your movement. There is no need to show an ID to
the police unless they have suspicion that you committed a crime and confront
you. There are no passport controls along roads. There is a huge difference
between the scales at which passport controls and CCTV can be executed, too,
because passport controls require work by a police officer, whereas CCTV can
be automated with face recognition. Our police is understaffed, too, you
rarely see them.

Whenever you use your ID card it is to buy alcohol or enter a concert, and
police do not check the ID, but an employee of the venue. The employees just
check the date of birth if you look like a young person, and sometimes if the
picture is matching your face.

~~~
icc97
I'm talking about when the police stop you. I live in Belgium and I've seen
the oppressive stop and searches the police do on buses. They come on and haul
people off.

You are required to have an ID on you at all times. If you don't have an ID on
you you've committed an offence.

It makes it very easy for police to find identities of people they question.
In the UK you have the privacy that you haven't committed an offence by not
having an ID so the police can't detain you. So you can just give a fake
address and the police can't do anything.

~~~
brokenmachine
_> So you can just give a fake address and the police can't do anything._

That sounds like a dangerous strategy. Surely lying to police is an offence.

You'd be better off asking what crime you are suspected of committing first,
and if there is none, declining to answer.

Of course, police probably wouldn't like that strategy much either.

------
jotm
I was wondering why they don't use old style phone boxes with new tech inside.
But of course, someone will piss, take a shit or do drugs inside. Great way to
ruin it guys.

