Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England

28 comments

1. Britain is really going all in on the police state.

2. When solved crime stats haven’t changed by 2028, (around 15% of crimes are actually closed with a suspect charged), then we will know that this is really just an uplift in surveillance on ordinary people, rather than a productive crime solving tool.

3. “The Home Office said the LFR vans will only be deployed when there is “specific intelligence”, and will be operated by trained officers who will check every match made by the cameras.”

   Bollocks. This will be rolled out everywhere and we will all be subject to constant, warrantless surveillance while the police still refuse to do *anything* about any of the crimes affecting the peasants.

4. Don’t all the serious criminals all wear masks?

   So really this is for catching people with overdue parking fines.

5. You can bet that everyone who holds up a sign criticising the Israeli Government will soon find themselves on the list used by this equipment, as only one example.

6. Guess we’re all getting face tattoos then??

   Either that or face painting on a regular basis.

7. Can’t we have a more affordable ice cream van on the road instead of adding more CCTV cameras to the streets?

8. Then we’ll see an increase in people wearing face masks

9. There’s already been cases of people wrongly flagged by these facial recognition cameras, in fact the met are already being sued by a couple of folk who were arrested due to a mistake by the facial recognition software.

10. Gotta gather that data for the incoming digital ID and social credit score.

11. Why is the UK going so dystopian with the heavy monitoring and invasion of privacy so much in recent years?

12. I remember government ministers criticising the use of facial recognition in China as being part of a pervasive police state.

13. At least police states like China or the UAE actually have something to show for it. You actually are safe & things are orderly.

    The UK will be the world’s first unsafe, shithole police state. Lol.

14. This country is Orwellian. Each day we slip further into an episode of black mirror. To call Britain a democracy is hilarious. We’re ruled by people you never see who use the government as puppets to further their interests. The sooner people wake up to that and kick off the better.

15. What took them so long? China’s had this for years.

16. That’s all the “Super Recognisers” out of a job then..

17. But they all wear masks anyway and many are undocumented

18. This will be used to record the face of every person and the data will be held centrally, without your consent. Don’t be surprised to find this matched against cctv footage and passport information so as they can know exactly who you are at any given time, and make an arrest based on the AI algorithm saying you look the closest match to the AI

19. I get how this feels sinister somehow, but if the news was police are sitting at the side of the street with a book of photos of wanted criminals so they can pick up any that walk by, we’d all say, that’s good. Thus is just making that actually efficient 

20. This won’t stop co-op from having to put meat in anti theft cages. It will just be used against ordinary people for non crime thought offences.

21. Of course they can justify this with the usual “but it helps us catch sex offenders, why on earth wouldn’t you want this?” But it’s a matter of proportionality. Putting monitoring equipment in everyone’s home would help catch sex offenders. But much like scanning the faces of everyone who walks past without their consent, it’s not proportionate.

    I wonder how many people would be happy with police vans stopping every citizen that walked past and taking compulsory DNA samples? The police only get away with this level of intrusive surveillance because it’s passive.

22. I presume we’re paying a shitload of tax money to (and giving data to) some american palintir-esque evil company for the privilage aswell right? That seems to be one of the main focuses of Labour at the moment.

23. I live in Nottingham City Centre, every day you see people stealing e bikes and shoplifting. People litter constantly. Near where I live there are always fights (every few weeks tbf). There is cctv everywhere, videoing all of it but it’s useless. Currently in order to prosecute they would have to find the suspect, go building to building to ask if their cctv worked and see if they could track where they ended up (like their car or their home). Obviously the man hours required to do this are just ridiculous so it will never be done. AI powered cameras that are networked could actually make it feasible to do something about these issues. Im sick of hearing the slippery slope fallacy. We are already being recorded 24/7 why don’t we make it help the majority of people?

24. More perceived security at the cost of personal liberty.

    Hardly anyone wants this.

25. We need at least one politician fighting for personal privacy. The people so clearly want it I don’t understand how there is no one talking about it. I’d vote for it as an issue

26. Palantir are shareholders popping the champagne right now

27. Why does the report not include false positive statistics? 

    You’re walking down the street, the camera thinks you’re someone else, you spend the rest of the day in the cells… How do you explain that if you miss a day’s work?

    They’re happy to say how many arrests they’ve made, but how many people’s lives have the messed with without due cause

28. More photographs!? Won’t someone think of the water required to store them!

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