
Facial recognition rolled out by London police sparking human rights concerns - pmoriarty
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/facial-recognition-london-police-accuracy-human-rights-crime-database-a8422056.html
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motohagiography
Mainly what it will likely be used for is similar to how cell phone tower data
is used today. It gives you a list of people in an area at a given time, which
you can correlate with other information like whether they are there often or
out of habit, and whether they are breaking a routine.

Add ALPR camera data, and a public records graph, and using those selectors
against other areas means you can narrow a list of suspects fairly quickly.

Arguably, surveillance merely polarizes crime instead of reducing it, where if
good people are too worried about the consequences of defending themselves, it
creates an effective %100 success rate for committing crimes and an
insignificant chance of eventual charges - there is little disincentive to to
criminals becoming super aggressive.

London is already the most surveiled city in the western world, and yet still
notorious for violent street crime. Adding facial recognition to the current
regime of cell towers, ALPR, cameras at every corner, cab cameras, and public
transit cameras, is meaningless.

What is most likely is that facial recognition will be used the way it is used
everywhere else in the world - for political pacification, not crime
reduction.

~~~
orcdork
"London [...] still notorious for violent street crime"

Which I find fairly strange all things considered - the crime index
([https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings.jsp](https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings.jsp)
\- admittedly this might not be the most accurate source) shows quite a gap
between other similar cities like New York - a fairly common comparison. As a
resident of a few years now, I definitely wouldn't say I felt London to have
that kind of feel, if anything violent crime has the effect of being shocking
because it is so uncommon.

I find it quite disheartening to see London's relatively soft-touch approach
lose out over "automated" policing, there's quite a bit of grumbling lately
over the reduction in actual people on the streets, mainly over police cuts.

~~~
Theodores
It is one of those glass half full things. If you have been the victim of a
mugging then you will start seeing scooter-gangs everywhere, before you never
noticed them and crime was only something you read about.

Incidentally these guys are quite a London thing, so if you are at the traffic
lights on your bike/scooter/car and you see two or more scooters with no
number plates and pillion passengers then you might want to start saying your
prayers.

The former chancellor of the exchequer had his phone nabbed by the legendary
moped gang thieves so it is not only in areas that are deprived where crime is
a problem. Don't walk and text in Central London, you will only be asking for
it.

They wear helmets and balaclavas underneath so I do not see how facial
recognition can help. Only arming the public with fully automatic assault
weapons can deter these ultra-violent thugs who happen to normally be only 15
years old.

~~~
banku_brougham
"ultra-violence", great clockwork orange reference.

------
jimnotgym
We have reached the levels of desperation whereby the police are willing to
employ a technology that clearly does not work, in order to pursue a goal of
policing with fewer police officers.

You only have to look at the widespread increase in CCTV use in Britain. Now
when you get mugged in London the police can get you a little video of your
hooded attackers for posterity. Except they only have time to go through the
recordings if you got murdered, otherwise you will just get a crime number.

~~~
cpmouter
I would like to know where you get that

1) It clearly does not work (as opposed to "it has a low accuracy" which just
means they will have to filter manually) and

2) They are pursuing a goal of policing with fewer police officers and

3) Having a working solution would mean they could police with fewer police
officers (cameras can't detain suspects or intervene when problems arise, AND
police officers don't carry a mental database of all suspects like a computer
could have, so having cameras does not replace having police officers).

~~~
barrkel
Scooter crime is exploding in London and police numbers have been falling for
a decade.

Personally I've had 3 scooter thefts on the past year, including a bike
jacking at a red light - more a robbery than theft.

All these criminals wear balaclavas even if they're not wearing helmets, and
they're used to using countermeasures against CCTV, so facial recognition
isn't likely to make a big difference to them.

~~~
IshKebab
Three in the past year? That's insanely unlucky. Do you carry baskets of
iPhones around council estates?

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simion314
What I am afraid is that we could get an even worse problem then the DNA and
fingerprints issue where so called experts will put innocent people in prison.
"The computer tells us that X was at the crime scene without reasonable doubt,
with the AI software could measure this blurred image and the computer experts
are sure that is almost impossible for the software to be wrong.

~~~
nathanyukai
But as long as they don't rely on this single evidence, that should be fine
right? If someone's hair, fingerprints all match the ones in crime scene, even
if the software only have 90% confidence, it should be good enough. Btw from a
blurred image, it's fundamentally impossible to have around 100% accuracy.

~~~
oldcynic
Do not underestimate the ability of juries to be swayed by impressive sounding
claims. Nor their ability to be swayed, and dismiss clear mitigations, by one
dominant or eloquent individual.

"Our facial recognition has over 90% accuracy" from the prosecution's expert
can easily become "clearly guilty" in the jury room.

~~~
coaxial
> 90% accuracy

I found this article helpful to understand why 90% accurate isn't as good as
it sounds: [https://www.badscience.net/2009/02/datamining-would-be-
lovel...](https://www.badscience.net/2009/02/datamining-would-be-lovely-if-it-
worked/)

He goes I to more detail in his book, bad science with a more detailed
explanation. It fools everyone because it is counterintuitive.

~~~
delinka
Please be sure to attend every jury trial for criminal cases and communicate
this to the jury.

~~~
oldcynic
Snark aside, it's important. There probably _should_ be someone adequately
numerate on every jury.

Most juries will have around half, perhaps more, who've done nothing at all
mathematical since school 10-45 years previously and think percentages are in
the difficult part of maths (ie it's more than basic arithmetic). HN is going
to be very unrepresentative for numeracy. :)

You want them to achieve "beyond reasonable doubt" conclusions from
probabilities, percentages, false positive rates and perhaps standard
deviations, well you may as well be making your case in French or Ancient
Greek that they can pick a few part-understood bits from.

Or hope for an eloquent statistician on the jury!

------
chiefalchemist
How soon before Amazon offers "policing" via mechanical turk?

That's not a joke.

~~~
BerislavLopac
You're being downvoted, but that's a pretty realistic scenario, at least from
a technical perspective. I can easily imagine a system which uses facial
recognition to narrow down to a choice of a few "best matches" (using police
mugshots, passport or driver licence photos, or whatever they have at their
disposal) and then crowdsource it via Mechanical Turk or even something like
Recaptcha to select the right one.

~~~
chiefalchemist
A down vote without a comment / explanation doesn't help much, if at all. It's
vague. It's lazy. It provides no context. As the definition of communication
goes, it's pointless.

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FreeTrade
If you assume one of the main directives of British police is to frustrate
radical political change and forestall revolution, none of their actions are
surprising.

~~~
claudiawerner
I don't see it as being that grand, at least not at the moment. I think we are
very far from something like May '68 or Soviet revolution. A lot of theory has
been dedicated to figuring out why we are in this situation in which there is
a completely inactive working class with very little drive behind them;
various explanations have been given, though - Marx's critique of ideology,
Althusser's explanations of ISAs and RSAs, Debord's of society of the
spectacle, the Frankfurt School's concentration on mass culture changing what
we define as being rational (and the closing off of the "extremes", for it is
no longer "reasonable" to operate outside of the "democratic" system etc.) all
the way to newer ideas; I'm reading "Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and
Marx on Desire at the moment, which carries the following rather provocative
tagline: "Why do people work for other people? This seemingly naïve question
is more difficult to answer than one might at first imagine, and it lies at
the heart of Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital."

~~~
ionised
The Snowden leaks highlighted how the intelligence and law enforcement
services in the UK surveilled the likes of the Open Rights Group, Oxfam etc.

If you were part of these organisations you were labelled a 'domestic
extremist'.

It is already happening. Has been for a long time.

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SN76477
I don't know what policing is for anymore. Crime is a part of the cost of a
free society. Fighting crime with such tools takes away a lot of freedom. This
is a power grab, I cannot imagine it helping anyone. Maybe it will solve a few
petty crimes, but it is a squeeze on freedom in my opinion.

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pasbesoin
I realize it's partially rhetorical, but I keep saying to the people who are
trying to shove this onto us, "You first."

Police still fight wearing and using body cams. Governments are becoming more
obstreperous, recalcitrant, and outright -- and arguable, illegally --
uncooperative with respect to Freedom of Information Act and other like
document production procedures and requests.

It seems, the powers that want this, want no aspect of this "transparency" for
themselves.

I'd like to see a private initiative and cameras take to tracking the elite
and the "nothing to hide" people.

Their actions and behavior already tell me, that they have plenty to hide.

Let's see them "live their everyday life", as they've known it, in the face of
relentless tracking and "accountability".

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TangoTrotFox
Is this something that will eventually spread to every single democracy? In a
vacuum it does not sound that awful. You can identify illegal actions and
individuals rapidly and effectively. As democracy entails a regular shifting
of individuals, it seems that the chances of any given democracy choosing to
consistently reject such utility in the longrun approaches zero. Even if the
vast majority oppose it, opinions quickly change after a frightful act when
whatever minority seeks to act such systems can effectively leverage the fear
to achieve their goal.

And if the answer to this question is yes, then where does it end? Or will
democracies invariably end up sacrificing any and all freedoms and rights of
privacy, that can be sacrificed, in the name of security?

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m12k
Genuine question: With the GDPR in effect, don't all CCTV operators in the EU
more or less need to have facial recognition in order to comply with any
"please show me any images you have of me and then delete them" requests?
(obviously they wouldn't need to run the facial detection always, only on
select faces when requested)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _With the GDPR in effect_

GDPR is interpreted and enforced at the national level. I'm going to go ahead
and assume the British data regulator won't rule against its own government.

~~~
m12k
Sure, how about private companies who have CCTV then? Could someone just
'ddos' a supermarket chain by getting a hundred people to all ask for their
CCTV footage?

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TamDenholm
Surely someone will come up with a device that can mask your face from cameras
without literally putting a mask on. I dont know what that would be or if that
would be made illegal or not, because surely they couldnt make a literal
halloween mask illegal. I would buy that device.

~~~
ColanR
Surprised no one has mentioned UV-emitting LEDs embedded in a hat. No visible
light emitted, but looks like a spotlight to cameras & hides the face in the
blinding light.

~~~
ReverseCold
Isn't that damaging to your eyes? Also, good UV filters do exist, it would
just be a bit more expensive.

------
bArray
As a security concerned British person, this throws multiple red flags to me.

1\. A Country that failed to upgrade it's NHS systems from Windows XP after
10+ billion pounds of investment and subsequently got hacked, leading to many
deaths - scares me. The data they are collecting is _very_ intimate. If it was
leaked, somebody could track persons of interest (government officials,
politicians, journalists, undercover police, etc), tell whether somebody is
having an affair, make correlations between friends groups - tonnes of data.
They could potentially figure out where you work, where you go for lunch, who
you meet, who you phone - it's just too much.

2\. Today it's about catching "known" criminals, tomorrow it's about
predicting future criminals and sending them to state "rehabilitation" camps
(just look at China), selling you data to the highest bidder (it's happened on
the Council level in the past) or some other ridiculous use. Blocking websites
on the internet used to be about removing exploitation of young persons, now
it's used to block pirating of copyright material.

3\. A right to be forgotten - if you've done nothing wrong, you shouldn't be
tracked. I can understand the need to hold this sort of data for a short
period of time, but after this it should be deleted. I think privacy is a
fundamental freedom, along with freedom of speech, freedom to travel, etc.

4\. The accuracy of facial detection, even if it's 99.99% for 70 million
people, is still 7000 mistakes (at a massive simplification). It's actually
worse than that, both the real accuracy of face detection and the error rate
for specific people. It's also "easy" to trick. When it works it works well,
but what about the person who is incorrectly detained, potentially injured for
a crime they never committed? And that's not even taking into consideration
that a lot of these face detection algorithms tend to be subtly racist (over
trained on locals, badly trained on foreign persons).

5\. Lack of oversight for such a powerful technology - to collect data on this
magnitude is absolutely insane and needs multiple groups of people to keep
it's use in check. Not just government based but also separate non-government
groups which receive funding elsewhere.

That all said, I can understand the clear benefit - remove the human element
from tracking these people. But with any powerful technology we must always
ask - at what cost? I think this inflicts too much on a persons basic
freedoms.

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dominotw
I think this was used in the recent gazzete newspaper shooting to identify the
perpetrator.

------
growlist
If the police are lacking in criminals to lock up I can suggest a few thousand
in various northern cities that they've been refusing to investigate for 10-15
years.

~~~
ionised
What are you referring to?

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lord_ring_111
Human rights vs protection from criminals/terrorists is a delicate balance. I
am curious what are the human rights that get violated by having cameras that
identify illegal activities.

~~~
realusername
> I am curious what are the human rights that get violated by having cameras

Privacy is a human right.

~~~
JackCh
We live in a world where the rights of criminals are given more respect than
the privacy of their victims.

~~~
ionised
How so?

