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13 Sep 2023 | 3
Brit police's use of facial-recognition tech is lawful, no need to question us, cops' lawyer tells Court of Appeal
South Wales Police and the UK Home Office "fundamentally disagree" that automated facial recognition (AFR) software is as intrusive as collecting fingerprints or DNA, a barrister for the force told the Court of Appeal yesterday. Jason Beer QC, representing the South Wales Police (SWP) also blamed the Information Commissioner's …
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Friday 26th June 2020 17:54 GMT Wellyboot
Re: UK police use of facial-recognition tech is lawful, no need to question us
Lifting fingerprints or DNA at crime scene - proportional and related to an actual crime (keeping both for years from individuals ruled out during investigations is a different issue)
Facial recognition can only be less intrusive and proportional if the system discards images that do not match individuals actually being sought by plod.
While we don't have any right to privacy on the street, that doesn't extend into the right to build a dossier of Joe Publics movements and interactions, it's stalking.
I don't care that my image may be on a 1,000 different security systems, I do object to anyone stitching together a timeline of my life from them.
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Monday 29th June 2020 12:21 GMT LucreLout
Re: UK police use of facial-recognition tech is lawful, no need to question us
While we don't have any right to privacy on the street
While I agree that you are broadly correct, there are limits to this.
Lets take an ordinary sex pervert (me here after) and a hot as a thousands suns 23 year old blonde (Blonde here after and man do I hope I have the e no e thing the right way around). I walk past Blonde in the street and think "nice, I quite enjoy looking at her" and figure since I have an hour to kill, I'll follow her about looking at her, because she has no right to privacy in the street, right?
Ok, so far so creepy, but lets expand this. Lets decide that I think Blonde is someone of interest to me (say as an extra curricular shag or whatever) but that Blonde doesn't actually know I've decided this. I then take to following Blonde about for a few hours a day, day after day, because, well, I can.
Now we've gotten really rather creepy, but wait.... I'm not that kind of creepy, I'm worse. I decide that I really want to know more about Blonde so I start doing reverse google searches on photos I've now taken of her face, and I start trying to eaves drop her phone conversations and steal glances at her phone to try to put a name to the face. I then optimize my enjoyment of what I'm doing by following her instagram, twitter, facebook, etc etc because I like automating stuff and now I don't have to walk around. Maybe I automate extraction of exif data from the images and throw that at a map, just for fun. My fun, not Blondes.
That right to privacy has to interrupt me somewhere down the line. Or it should. My behavior here isn't what we'd consider normal, right? The only thing Blonde did to attract all this surveillance, monitoring, and investigation was walk past me in the street looking nice.
And yet, swapping out the sex pervert for a CCTV operator and you substantially have the same thing now. Throw that into a searchable database and its the same as me setting up a whatsapp group so my mates can also appreciate Blonde.
I understand that the state is exempt from a lot of things for a lot of reasons, but we should all have some level of privacy on the high street, even if only after a sensible number of days has expired. I mean, had CCTV been ever present in my younger days, the searchable database would throw up some seriously dubious fashion choices on my part...
Activity undertaken by the state should be understood at the public level. Every tourist in America is photographed and fingerprinted at the border - you accept it when you enter. In their defence, they're completely open about that and the data they retain, so why aren't our police?
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Friday 26th June 2020 17:41 GMT Doctor Syntax
"The Respondent employs AFR Locate at specific locations in the South Wales Police's area of responsibility. It could not lawfully or practically 'track the movements of individuals as they move around the country'."
The practicality could be addressed by deploying at more locations. If they claim the present deployment is lawful how many more deployments would it require to become unlawful? If it's not possible to answer that then maybe its no lawful now.
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Monday 29th June 2020 09:43 GMT Bernard M. Orwell
"How pervasive is cctv?"
It is estimated that there is one CCTV camera per 11 persons per capita in the UK. On the average commute to work (in london) you will be recorded over 100 times.
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10172298/One-surveillance-camera-for-every-11-people-in-Britain-says-CCTV-survey.html
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Monday 29th June 2020 15:40 GMT genghis_uk
Many years ago (early 2000's I think), there was a BBC program about how pervasive surveillance was getting. They followed a group of 20 somethings on a nigh out in Brighton.
They were picked up on a CCTV camera at the end of their street, followed to the bus stop, filmed on the bus, more filming in the high street, the pubs they went to, the nightclub and then all the way home again.
From 8pm through to 2am they were under constant scrutiny of one kind or another.
Obviously, they were aware and the BBC were proving a point but 15years ago there were enough cameras to do this. Ok, it was Brighton so there may have been more cameras than usual then but I would say that every city and major town can do this now.
Now add facial recognition into the mix (and assume it works as advertised) and you have a 1984 level of oversight. We know it does not work as advertised though and this, in some ways, makes it worse. Any time where you have to prove your innocence, the law is the wrong way round - guilty unless you can provide evidence to the contrary. If the computer spews out an incorrect match, you are guilty in the eyes of the police... now prove it was not you!
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Friday 26th June 2020 18:30 GMT Falmari
Keep a straight face.
How could he keep a straight face when he said this "The [facial-recognition tech] is no more intrusive than the use of CCTV on the streets."
If the tech actually worked, then the very nature of what it is meant to do makes it more intrusive. You have CCTV that can track everyone whose face it captures. How can that be anything but more intrusive?
If (when) this gets fully deployed it will be so open to abuse. I can see it now some plod has a grudge against someone, partner playing away from home, feed their image into the system to track where they have been.
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Saturday 27th June 2020 11:16 GMT Graham Cobb
Re: Keep a straight face.
It is obviously much more intrusive: CCTV does not (attempt to) identify people - it records images for use later if justified at THAT (later) time by reasons which are proportional, etc. For example, a crime has happened.
AFR (attempts to) identify everyone it captures - then, based on that identification, may apply some selection or proportionality requirement.
The act of trying to identify people is additional to the act of recording. The recording may be permitted under CCTV laws, but the additional act of identifying has nothing to do with the CCTV laws must require separate legal authorisation.
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Saturday 27th June 2020 23:54 GMT David 164
Re: Keep a straight face.
I presume he meant cctv that is monitor live by human operators, who can then manually track the user across the area of cameras they have access to. In this way it no less intrusive than a live human operated camera feeds that are run by super markets and many other venues. Or indeed many of London own cctv cameras are now monitor live by human operators.
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Monday 29th June 2020 12:28 GMT LucreLout
Re: Keep a straight face.
If the tech actually worked, then the very nature of what it is meant to do makes it more intrusive. You have CCTV that can track everyone whose face it captures. How can that be anything but more intrusive?
It's not more intrusive, its simply more efficient. They already have a CCTV operator that can track your every move, what this does is automate and industrialize it.
I can see it now some plod has a grudge against someone, partner playing away from home, feed their image into the system to track where they have been.
There's easier databases to do that with already and properly serious consequences for abuse which is identified often enough to be a deterrent.
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Friday 26th June 2020 19:18 GMT Adair
So now
...the whole English population is in an identity parade, on the off chance we might [possibly] match some template.
On that basis why don't we just cut to the logical conclusion and give everybody a suspended sentence in advance of them being caught doing whatever it is that we do to offend 'the law'. After all there's no point in throwing everyone in jail, the sheeple need to work to earn the money that the priviledged few need to keep them in the manner to which they are forever wishing to become accostomed but which is forever just beyond their reach - someone else always has that little bit more than they do.
The 'little people' - 'the law' will keep them from getting too uppity.
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Saturday 27th June 2020 11:23 GMT Graham Cobb
Re: So now
And what if you happen to look a bit like someone on the wanted list? It would be unreasonable and unfair that everyone who looks like someone on the list is stopped all the time even if that is a tiny minority. We must require there has to be some additional justification which would protect these unfortunate individuals from turning their honest and ordinary life into a dystopian nightmare (additional reasons might include, for example, a crime has happened nearby, or there is intelligence suggesting the particular criminal is in that area at that time).
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Saturday 27th June 2020 14:53 GMT Adair
Re: So now
How about: we just don't do it at all? Problem solved.
Just because something can be done - murder for example - doesn't mean it should be done.
Somehow human civilization has managed to stagger through the last five thousand years without the means to randomly check every passing face against a vast data base of 'persons of interest' and then to proceed to generate x number of false positives/negatives, ruin people's days/lives, hang on to data even though we said we would delete it, and generally act like 'God', but in a very 'human' - that is to say 'broken' - kind of way, and somehow claim that 'we are improving the quality of people's lives'. Utter bullshit.
Two things: power and money.
And a third thing: fuck 'quality of life'.
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Monday 29th June 2020 12:30 GMT heyrick
Re: So now
"And what if you happen to look a bit like someone on the wanted list?"
This wasn't even creepy cam. This was just black dude and his father on bikes who just happened to match the description of a recent nearby stabbing where the assaillants were described as...tada...two black guys on bikes.
Now imagine how well this is going to go when a machine is connected to various cameras, trying to identify everybody it sees, and periodically screams "WITCHES!". Especially when you consider that such systems are notoriously poor at distinguishing people who aren't white.
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Saturday 27th June 2020 09:53 GMT Neil Barnes
This is legislation which affects everyone, immediately and continuously
It should not be decided by a judge as to whether the legal framework exists in which it can be used, but rather a citizen wide vote - and a non-vote counts against it. When 30 million or so people agree that this makes sense, then it might be considered...
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Saturday 27th June 2020 12:16 GMT Jason Bloomberg
Re: This is legislation which affects everyone, immediately and continuously
a citizen wide vote - and a non-vote counts against it
One can't take the non-votes of people who "don't care", or are "happy to have what those who do vote choose", as votes against. That's no more sound than letting the other side have it the other way.
We need credible and rational argument against AFR which goes beyond hoping to tilt things in our favour.
Most people consider having more cops on the beat a good thing; keeping an eye out for ne'er-do-wells, imagine Robocops would be better at that, and see AFR as the easier, cheaper and practical option.
That's what we are up against.
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Saturday 27th June 2020 21:20 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: This is legislation which affects everyone, immediately and continuously
"One can't take the non-votes of people who "don't care", or are "happy to have what those who do vote choose", as votes against. That's no more sound than letting the other side have it the other way."
A non-vote is a vote for the status quo. Simples :-)
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Monday 29th June 2020 10:03 GMT Bernard M. Orwell
Re: This is legislation which affects everyone, immediately and continuously
"A non-vote is a vote for the status quo."
This may be widely down-voted, but in political tradition, and standing orders, when a vote is tied it is usually the duty of the chair to vote in order to maintain the status quo, which usually (but not always) involves voting against a motion that changes something..most motions in other words. This is known as "Egality".
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Saturday 27th June 2020 23:58 GMT David 164
Re: This is legislation which affects everyone, immediately and continuously
You would lose any such vote. No under the stupid rules you put in place but under rules that would be written by the electoral commission and where someone who isn't making a vote is presume to vote no, I might not turn up to vote but I have no problem with the technology.
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Monday 29th June 2020 12:34 GMT LucreLout
Re: This is legislation which affects everyone, immediately and continuously
It should not be decided by a judge as to whether the legal framework exists in which it can be used, but rather a citizen wide vote - and a non-vote counts against it
Sorry, but that's a naked attempt to queer the pitch and you know it. You're trying to assign the votes of those that don't care enough to vote tot he outcome you desire. Conventionally non-voters are considered to have sided with the majority, not some pre-ordained outcome you're trying to get.
I think we both know the winning side in any straight count will be for CCTV and monitoring, because people are scared, they're ignorant, and they assume there's no downside for themselves. Kids these days want to be watched, by anyone and preferably everyone. We'd get outvoted in a second because the young not only don't care about their privacy, but they actively want the opposite.
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Sunday 28th June 2020 16:28 GMT Mark192
Please let me know if I've got this wrong.
It doesn't try to identify everyone, it checks everyone to see if they are on the list of naughty people.
I see three things happening:
- Cameras set up all over the place like ANPR cameras are (11,000 ANPR cameras in the UK?)
- Police scrambling to fill databases with as many people's face data as possible unless legislation comes in to restrict it (to criminals, people charged, people arrested, political activists?)
- Law to enforce carrying of ID as the 'obvious' solution to the arresting of innocent people with no ID on them because the 'computer said yes and he looks like the picture'.
Fortunately with my big nose and eyes-so-close-together-I-have-to-use-binoculars-as-a-monocular I'm unlikely to be a match with anyone.
You, my friend, may not be so lucky. Dress nice, speak posh and hope your doppelgänger is wanted for street crime not something middle class like tax evasion.
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Monday 29th June 2020 09:13 GMT Intractable Potsherd
Don't be so sure. I'm passing ugly (not enough to scare a troll into fits, but enough to scare small children and animals if the light is right), but I've seen two people close enough to make even me look twice. One was the clergyman conducting my nephew's christening, and the other was a bloke on the alumni version of "University Challenge".
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Monday 29th June 2020 12:00 GMT hoola
Big Brother is watching
It is always far more difficult to undo something than put a sensible framework in place first. The fact it facial recognition does not work now is a complete red herring. There has to be a robust set of regulations and rules around this because it is open to so much abuse.
We are very rapidly approaching the point where technology is become cheap enough and sufficiently powerful that these sorts or systems become viable. All the big-brother scenario films are close to becoming reality and whilst I believe that generally UK police are reasonably trustworthy it is something that can change. They are increasingly becoming a political tool with elected commissioners (or whatever they are called). The fact that the the politicians are becoming lest trustworthy, more likely to lie and the increased status of the special advisers leads me to believe that we should be very worried about this.
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Monday 29th June 2020 12:45 GMT Version 1.0
Re: Mask
Sure but if you are going to wear a CAT'S mask make sure it's Mungojerrie or Jennyanydots, not Macavity because if the cameras see you wearing a Macavity mask they will know that you're a master criminal who can defy the law, you are the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair but when they reach the scene recorded by the AI, you won't be there and they will just say, "Well I guess that AI face recognition isn't always accurate."
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Monday 29th June 2020 09:47 GMT Grease Monkey
22%
If it has a 22% false positive rate then why are they continuing to use it? Obviously there's no figure for false negatives (how would they know) but a rate of false positives of more than 1 in 5 is something that nobody in the private sector would put up with on a product that they are paying for. So why do they continue to use it and indeed pay for it?
Well the simple answer is this. It gives them an excuse for stop and search. As such they'd probably prefer a higher rate of false positives.
The detail I'd be interested in seeing is the rate of false positives on race. And while they're at it they can add things like facial hair and glasses to the list
Tell you what though. Let's all wear face coverings to protect ourselves from covid-19 and AFR. It's a win win.
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Monday 29th June 2020 18:56 GMT JCitizen
Food for thoughts and comparison...
Okay - I get the reasons for push back - and that is healthy in any free society. But I live in a small town, where EVERYBODY knows who you are and probably even know things that are true, that even I didn't know myself, or forgot, at least. So it is difficult for me to see what all the fuss about cameras and facial recognition is all about. Now we do occasionally have a crime in Smallville, and everyone usually thinks they know who did it, but they are rarely correct, but because everyone sees everyone else going down the street, and they know them, it is probably assumed by a person from the large metropolis that Joe Local Sixpack is a goner for good in the courts; but that is rarely how it turns out. Here is the reason why - no matter how well the witness thinks they saw Joe going down the street near the crime scene near the correct time of the incident, they STILL have to prove the ID of the crook under suspicion. This part never ceases to amaze me, because when the police do a line up so the witness(es) can ID the perp, it never fails that they flunk the test for ID of the real perp!!
So I figure even if the plod have the suspect on CCTV, the court should wait until a camera facial recognition can survive a line up. Why not? Is this machine any better than a real human eye witness? Well actually I should hope so, but I have my doubts. Even people in my town have got away with murder, so just how bad is this surveillance after all. I really don't fear public recognition machines at all. It just comes from being from a small town - your mileage may differ.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
