Plot twist: Google's not spying on King's Cross with facial recognition tech, but its landlord is Britons working for Google at its London HQ are being secretly spied on by creepy facial recognition cameras – but these ones aren't operated by the ad-tech company. Instead it's the private landlord for most of the King's Cross area doing the snooping, according to today's Financial Times. "The 67-acre King's Cross area, …
Failing that, happy to help out with a pair of side cutters.
It would be interesting to get an official opinion from the ICO in this, and they can't form that until they have investigated in full WTF is going on with the data that is gathered there. In short, it stinks.
If we constrain police operated cameras already (or try to, let's be honest), a private operator should be so tied up in red tape they should not even dare to think about misusing that information but at present they could be reselling it to all and sundry - nobody would know.
Wear Donald Trump facemask when walking through the KingsX development. I'm sure that Google won't be far behind with getting access to the Facial recognition feeds.
These people need to understand that we, the people do not want this type of spying when we go about out daily lives..
"These people need to understand that we, the people do not want this type of spying..."
Except that we are not "we, the people." We are a very small, technologically aware, privacy conscious subset of the people.
The people generally don't seem to give a toss. I've explained it on occasion to mainstream members of the people, and they have listened carefully, nodded in agreement, and made appropriate comments like "that's awful", or "how very dare they!"
They have then promptly gone back to not giving a toss, so long as they can access Farcebook, Instaspam et al. Whilst commentards here, the great folks at Privacy International, and a few others may protest facial recognition, nothing much will change whilst the rest of the population are drip-fed their dopamine.
I'm sure that Google won't be far behind with getting access to the Facial recognition feeds.
I think you can be pretty certain there's already a Cat 7 running from that rack to one that says "Google", there's a strong smell of nudge nudge, wink wink culture in all of this. It may even be why they went there in the first place - yummie live feeds to experiment with..
@AC: "vague and insubstantial assurances should just be treated as if they were lies."
Complete oxymoron isn't it? A 3rd partyiinvolving themselves in securing our privacy, when we didn't allow them in, in the first place.
"Imagine being spied on every day by a large unnaccountable company, just because you implicitly agreed to their terms and conditions when you accessed their terrain!"
Like entering a tube station and your Wi-Fi presence being tracked by TfL
"But you just need to turn off Wi-Fi to 'opt-out'"
...the jury (or rather the ICO) is still out on this one..
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2019/07/blog-live-facial-recognition-technology-data-protection-law-applies/
...findings to follow.
I suspect this is exactly why they are so keen to get it deployed in "trials" as often and widespread as possible. They want to normalise it as quickly as possible so as to influence any future laws controlling it.
It needs someone or a group with the money to challenge this using GDPR.
I again get to ask the question, if it doesn't work (as the police keep telling us) why are people spending money to put it in place?
For what it's worth I believe it works just fine with an accuracy rate above 90% but no one wants to admit that just yet so they can get them in place for that all important public *shrug* of it's already in place what does it matter.
I believe it works just fine
Thing is, I have a car with "road sign recognition" via a windscreen-mounted camera and GPS, a task that should be a couple of orders of magnitude easier than facial recognition, particularly from CCTV type images, and yet the car gets it wrong time and time again.
They are talking about making speed limiters based on this technology mandatory in the next few years and I am dreading the day I tootle down the bypass at a perfectly legal 40mph only to have the limiter kick in at 20mph because it's picked up a roadsign on an adjacent road. This kind of mis-recognition happens all the time, but in the current car it is not connected directly to the limiter and merely flashes up an annoying warning.
If they can't get something as simple as road sign recognition right, I have no confidence at all that facial recognition is anything other than an interesting research topic at the moment. Shame, as I would rather like to have faces in my vast collection of family photographs categorised automatically...
M.
They are talking about making speed limiters based on this technology mandatory in the next few years and I am dreading the day I tootle down the bypass at a perfectly legal 40mph only to have the limiter kick in at 20mph because it's picked up a roadsign on an adjacent road. This kind of mis-recognition happens all the time, but in the current car it is not connected directly to the limiter and merely flashes up an annoying warning.
My new 70 m.p.h road sign stick on camera stickers buisness will be up and running by then
Similar issue in my car, made worse when you turn on the adaptive speed limiter that *does* reduce your speed to match the limit as you pass a sign.
Unfortunately it chose to read a 50 marker on the back of a lorry on the motorway, causing the car to brake unexpectedly from the 70 I had been doing.
It also dislikes large, light coloured vehicles parked on the near-side on gentle right hand bends, although only on bright, sunny days.
In these situations it likes slamming the brakes on to avoid the collision that wasn't going to happen.
First "feature" now turned off. It still gets stuff wrong, but just flashes annoyingly rather than attempting to insert my tailgate into the bonnet of the following vehicle. Second feature dialed back to least sensitive, notionally reducing the protection offered as the car will brake later and harder if I miss something going on in front of me, but actually increasing my safety by not activating erroneously.
Autonomous vehicles may be coming, but they're a way off yet.
Just out of interest, what sort of car is it? Mine's a relatively low-spec Citroën. The speed limit recognition system can only be temporarily defeated by delving three levels deep in the menus of the ridiculous centre-console touch screen. Next time you start the engine, it's back on. The lane departure system is slightly better in that there's a button dedicated to turning it off but it, too, switches back on next time.
I've not had the proximity warning system apply the brakes yet, but it does flash up annoying warnings or beeps or both (seems completely inconsistent) at slightly odd times. If it took account of relative speed it'd be better - it goes off most often when some eejit on the motorway overtakes then pulls in too close, but as they're usually doing maybe 10mph more than I am, they're not too close for too long.
I've already asked "someone who should know" about flipping some ECU bits to disable the functions permanently...
M.
I think they see it as a way to flag possible suspects for manual checking. At present they don't have a hope of watching all the cameras in any way at all other than by manually looking through recordings after an event. They hope that if it shows up a suspect at all over hundreds of otherwise unwatchable cameras, that will be an 'improvement', and the accuracy will only improve.
It doesn't work but the cops are too fascinated with their new shiny-shiny to care.
Also it's helpfully biased towards the same certain segments of the population they are, so helps them play "stop and search snooker".
Let's not forget the average plod barely knows the laws they have to enforce on a daily basis* let alone data privacy ones.
*Like the poor sod they arrested for walking past the camera vans in Wales with his face covered, which is not actually illegal.
It works well enough to deliver a benefit the interests investing in it and the costs of its failure are imposed on people that don't matter.
As a commercial landlord, if you correctly tag 50% of troublemakers and dispatch a mall cop to kick them off your premises that's a win for you. If you also incorrectly tag the same number of people the mall cop can simply pull his punch if the subject looks obviously affluent/white/middle class and for the others, nobody cares unless society provides an accessible mechanism for them to obtain redress which won't happen often enough for the landlord to be incentivised to change their approach.
Sucks to be him------>
So they install face recognition technology but what do they compare the faces against? Will Mr Plod give them a pictures of known baddies? Will they harvest profile pictures from Face-de-bouc?
What are they going to do when a face matches? Declare an orange alert and send in Rover?
@Aging Hippie: "what do they compare the faces against"
If only there were a large, publicly available source of names,... like a large book,.... of faces,.....
If only there were a near instant way of finding photos of people,.... if only you could get an image, and snap! find a match,..... if only there was a way to link one image in to another,.....
...how much of the public roadways and footpaths in this 67 acre site have been sold to the developers?
I'm assuming they have been sold, since I suspect placing cameras in private areas come under different, probably less strict rules and laws than those capturing images of people in public areas.
I am USAian, but of British ancestry, and a friend who went to England before I did came back to say, "there are about twelve faces in England, and you have one of them." Yep, walking around London felt like a family reunion. For the Caucasian part of the British populace, anyway, I cannot see how face recognition would work there. Just my tuppence. Or, wear one of these =====>
"These cameras use a number of detection and tracking methods, including facial recognition, but also have sophisticated systems in place to protect the privacy of the general public."
Yes, that gets repeated over and over, but what are they being used FOR? Why do you need facial recognition? Whose database are you using to individually identify people's faces?
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