Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Stop replacing London’s phone boxes with corporate surveillance

wired.co.uk

148 points_ao789112 comments

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... [2] https://www.lorextechnology.com/articles/What-is-4k-Video/R-...

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...

With state surveillance, I'd agree. I don't think things are so clear cut for private sector actors. Private CCTV is tolerated because it's a) typically not a networked system, b) rarely mined for analytics and c) often conflated with council run systems anyway.

> (or was forced to them and they didn't push back )

How do you suggest that we should have pushed back? By voting the bastards out? The UK is actually quite good at that, but policy outlives politicians thanks to the civil service.

New government can easily reverse or change the policies of previous governments, the civil service jut enacts what the government of the day tells them to do.

Sort of. The civil service has lots of people with their own agenda which they push to the elected politicians when they ask the civil service for options on how to solve problems

The civil service doesn't push their own agenda. They are tasked with finding solutions to enact policy decisions, they provide the best solutions that they can that will fulfill the policy presented by the government. A civil servant cannot push their own agenda and the civil service as a whole doesn't have an agenda except to serve the government of the day to the best of their ability regardless of their personal politics.

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.

The answer is face recognition.

I saw the CCTV footage - impossible.

Current quality for the majority of CCTV is probably not good enough for facial. May be gait recognition is more feasible.

There's an interesting article in last month's Economist. They show resolution that let's an operator recognise a face a mile up the road. That was in Islington.

Maybe a zoom lens that does.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo

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.

>It's even worse, it means the police know it doesn't track criminals and so just want to track regular people.

The police knowing is really beside the point, local government (councils) own and operate the public space CCTV, the police will and do make use of it. The problem is quality and with quality is identification. If no one knows the person on CCTV there's not much to be done.

The point is that regular folk don't hide their face, so they're easy to be tracked. But criminals know just to hide their features.

Maybe it's just paranoia but I neither want to have to hide my face nor worry about getting spotted in the wrong place at the wrong time by accident.

The police by the very definition of their job don't go around "tracking" regular folk. Only those that are doing or have done wrong. Seriously the police have better things to do than watch people on CCTV who aren't doing anything wrong. Not to mention the various laws and regulations that prevent the police doing just that.

Councils on the other hand are a different thing.

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

Damn, there goes another good theory. Perhaps I should change my example to the English getting sunburnt lying on Spanish beaches.

I think you'll find that is more likely Scots rather than English. The Big Yin famously described the effect in his Aussie tours. To be fair, us southerners can also burn as well (but I personally don't.)

What you might consider "English" is two countries and four nations. It's complicated. For safety, I'd refer to the two large islands off the NW of mainland Europe as "Britain and Ireland" (in short.) It's complicated.

I'm English and I've been sunburnt lots, I seem literally incapable of pre-planning against it. Doesn't need to be Spanish beeches though. I'm thinking of the English style tourist who wants his egg and chips wherever he is.

s/English/British/g

English people are from England, British people are from four nations.

But yes, Complicated. Very.

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.

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."

Yes I'd put it something like a floppy disk for save. It might not be true but it gets the point across.

Never-the-less I respect a good nitpick and I didn't know the article so for me it's a welcome reply

That's not proof it doesn't work. If you ran the GCHQ and you had a way to track everyone, would you let it be used to solve petty crime ? Much safer to use it sparingly.

The Security Service has access to all publically paid for CCTV cameras in the UK. Motorways, airports, city centres etc

Would you not? It would make you pretty popular for one thing, and much easier to get funding next year.

Clearly the answer is to upgrade several million cameras to 4K, 60fps, IR at night models. Then all can do facial recognition, APNR, etc.

One of the arguments for mass surveillance is that you could hand over to another system if the suspect goes off-camera. So in this case, presumably they knew exactly what time the thief left the building and, provided everyone talks to each other, you could figure out where he went next. Ultimately you might be able to determine where the suspect lived or transition to a camera where better footage is available. Problem is that while we are watched en masse, most of these systems are separate. I'm not arguing that we should have this capability, but this is the obvious use-case.

The quality of CCTV footage (or lack of) is well known. How many times have you seen a news report with a blurry photo of a suspect and a plea for information? This is vague proof that mass surveillance is ineffective unless you throw serious manpower at it.

This is what happens in the case of serious terrorism cases, where the police can wave RIPA around and subpoena footage from everyone, but presumably tracking between cameras still requires a lot of manual intervention (and therefore money). Catching a locker thief isn't worth it.

At least these cameras give you WiFi in return

Okay, I'm going to toss out downvote material because I think it's important to say.

> Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance.

I think Americans are actually 99% comfortable with massive surveillance but can't admit it because of our culture. We consume reality TV like no one's business, watch YouTube to see people do dumb things in real life, and just in general, feel the urge to record and capture everything.

The 1% we disagree with is when it happens to be us doing something we didn't want anyone to see because it's embarrassing or causes us some kind of hardship e.g. pay a fine for breaking a law.

Personally, even if I have something to hide, it's my responsibility to hide it, or to stop doing it, and therefore, the public good shouldn't be hindered because I'm a crappy person.

If we could implement a CCTV system with ACTUAL checks and balances i.e. used my authorities, regulated by a public authority, and monitored by some third-party NON-CORPORATE watchdog, I'll vote for it as often as they'd let me.

If it's 1% more effective at stopping sexual assaults, preventing kidnappings, or protecting us from mass shootings, then it's 100% worth it.

Maybe I'm just part of that 1% who will reject this idea.

Is a 1% reduction in any crime really worth a totalitarian world where the state can hunt down people who disagree with them?

>Okay, I'm going to toss out downvote material because I think it's important to say.

I didn't get past that first sentence of irrelevant filler.

You’d be better served expending energy reading my comment rather than proclaiming your failure to read it, friend.

Well, judging from the first line, I thought not. And don't be snarky then call me "friend". Thanks. I guess I was too obliquely referring to the "don't mention voting, it's tiresome" guideline. I was offering anecdata, sample size 1, that your first line could also serve to deter readers, which it seemed you hadn't considered. Well, I've learnt (from this and my previous attempt) that offering what free advice I can on here on how to better reach readers, isn't appreciated, so I shall stop. Thanks.

I would say Britons are 95% comfortable with government surveillance. But there is a growing backlash against private/corporate surveillance.

Of course, there is a grey-area with government surveillance when things like ANPR services are outsourced with completely opaque contracts.

We are Britons in Britain. There is no one living here by the name of Average Joe. There are a lot of cameras here, many more than than some other places apparently. The vast majority of those cameras are in town and city centres or on the motorways. It is possible that in Britain we are able to count better (and publish) than some other regions and hence look bad in this regard - who knows.

I don't feel more "surveilled" here than I do in say Italy, France or the US (all of which I am pretty familiar with). I will say that I do feel looked upon when driving along the M42, south of Birmingham, there are a lot of cameras there but that area is a massive cross-road for the UK and an obvious place to want to keep an eye on.

Push back? Will do when things really do go wrong. You don't know us ... mate.

>> Push back? Will do when things really do go wrong. You don't know us ... mate.

Problem is, if things "really" do go wrong, it will be too late to push back.

Bear in mind that this is a land that has executed kings and been a short lived Republic, run up a fairly large Empire and died back down and is still a constitutional monarchy. We've done a few other things here as well.

It's never too late. We're odd.

It is also a country were police officers used the names and identities of people who died as infants to infiltrate activist groups, often having relationships with female members to gain their trust:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/undercover-policing-in...

You don't need to wait too long, I'd say.

>> 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.

The British just have their own ideas about privacy. I've lived here 12 years and I still don't understand how almost everybody leaves their blinds up with the lights on, after dark. It's not without risk either. I think it was last summer when, for a few nights, Creepy Old Dude would walk past my window mumbling "show us your pussy" and "show us your legs". On the other hand, every so often someone tars people leaving their blinds down or curtains drawn as "skivers" sleeping it off through the day while everyone else goes to work [1], or as potential terrorists hiding some nefarious plot [2].

Then again, when a few years ago, the Labour government passed a law introducing ID cards for every citizen, everybody went up in arms - citing everything from concers about the potential for abuse and discrimination against minorities, the access of third parties to the database etc. Even -I kid you not- the conflict of a national ID card with Human Rights legislation, which is usually portrayed as a "criminal's charter" [4].

But- nobody worries that this is the European nation with most cameras than any other, or about the "Snooper's charter" (a.k.a. the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 [5]). I guess people really feel they have nothing to fear. There may be a historical explanation for why the UK is like this: most other nations in Europe have at some point been under the control of a totalitarian government that spied on its citizens and used the information collected to brutally oppress them.

But I'm sure that will never happen in the UK.

_______________

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2012/oct/08/curtai...

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10929203

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006#Object...

[4] Search for "Human rights laws are a charter for criminals, say 75% of Britons". I'm not linking to the Daily Mail directly.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

I suspect it's partially an emotional response to ID cards - there's no current requirement to carry (or hold) ID, and the concept conjurers up clear images of Nazi Germany.

Regarding blinds, I doubt many people even think about it - you aren't doing anything private (or even interesting most of the time), so it just doesn't occur to you. It's also generally considered rude to stare into people's houses, so even if they can, there is a general presumption that people won't. It's quite possibly related to your last paragraph - there's no culture of shielding your day-to-day life because they has never been anything really to shield it from ("no need to hide" being subtly different to "nothing to hide" - even people with things they would rather not be public don't necessarily see the need to conceal them from the government).

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.

> 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)

Can you explain a bit more what you mean here? Where are you to make this statement (UK like the article?)? Are you just talking about calls on public phones? When you say "recorded" do you mean metadata only, or the actual audio?

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.

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.

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

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.

A short-term competitive advantage can come with long-term fragility and susceptibility to disaster. For instance, imagine two countries with identical resources, one increases its population so that yearly food production can barely sustain it, while the other has a smaller rate of growth. The first will have a competitive advantage every year until a drought comes, when it will be hit by disaster.

Similarly the competitive advantages you describe may come with long-term risks that are harder to measure or predict, especially those that come from the government itself.

Knowing what I know about credit scores, it's a bad example.

But I agree that the fundamental struggle with legible societies is asymmetry of access to data and a fair and open access leads to fairer outcomes.

As for a "competitive advantage" personally I think such concepts are nonsensical and over prioritize the personal experience of those at the top of huge social hierarchies rather than any reality.

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.

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

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

...but the product is free WiFi.

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.

Carrier signals suck in many parts of NYC. There’s a value for on street WiFi.

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.

Possible on Android and without root?

As of iOS 8 and Android 5.0 the operating systems should do it automatically.

  researchers found that "the overwhelming majority of
  Android devices are not implementing the available
  randomization capabilities built into the Android OS,"
  which makes such Android devices trivial to track.
  [...]
  Apple, meanwhile, introduced MAC address randomization in
  iOS 8, only to break it in iOS 10. [...] its network probe
  broadcasts to include a distinct Information Element (IE),
  data added to Wi-Fi management frames to extend the Wi-Fi
  protocol.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/mac_address_randomi...

For avoiding wifi tracking I suggest Smarter Wifi Manager [0]. It's great for automatically keeping wifi off when not at home/work.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kismetwire...

MAC address randomisation has been proven to be essentially useless: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.02874v1

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.

Youre still being tracked by your phone service provider though.

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

Does anyone know how the MAC randomisation in Windows 10 devices stacks up? I'd assume it's better than a fixed MAC, but a quick Google search doesn't give much info. about how easily it can be sidestepped.

Preventing every possible form of tracking is so difficult it’s almost a lost cause.

Preventing forms of tracking that are actually in use is much easier.

The goal isn't to defeat every possible form of tracking, it's to make it more difficult than it's worth to track you. Do you think this system even bothers to take into account the tiny number of people who turn MAC randomization on?

I don't think my door lock is going to protect me against a professional locksmith, having one is nonetheless still useful.

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

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.

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?

Good question. Many people really don't like the incredible amount of cultural and political influence that these large multinational corporations are obtaining through data collection and analytics. This is just another example of corporate influence extending further into aspects of society that were formerly handled by the government.

Since someone already explained, would you mind explaining why the part about data in the article didn't strike you as bad in the first place?

Probably because there i know that my data have been already sold.

McDonald will sell my data when i use they WiFi. My network provider will sell my data, my phone provider. Fitness company also will sell me.

Facebook consider me as a product for 5-6 years already.

I think in modern society it is a normal thing

First: you speak for yourself. I for example share nothing on my fake name Facebook account. I use it to tell relatives to call me/send me a Signal message. Even with an Facebook account, they can only share what you give them. Nobody forces you to use McDonalds WiFi. Use your data plan. Your ISP must have some kind of stricter regulations even outside of Europe (where I am) then some ad sponsored access point.

There are huge differences and data minimization is a thing.

Your approach however is terrible. It makes it look like everything is lost and there is nothing to protect anymore. This is not only wrong, it sends out a horrible message to others.

In theory, yes, but I would question how many users realise that using the service consents to being tracked across the city.

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?

I believe Google only got in trouble for sniffing the IP traffic content inadvertantly. The probe/broadcast traffic (aka your phone saying “hello I am IDENTIFIER!”) is not unlawful to capture though.

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?

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.

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!

> ... if you want want you can just not to use this kiosks, right?

When they start enabling the cameras, thereby likely capturing passers-by too, things could get tricky.

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.

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.

> As a German, you could not be more wrong [...]

Why do you think he's German?

They don't, I'm assuming they're speaking as a German. I'm a Brit living in Belgium.

I see the difference and I wish I could have the privacy of no ID cards back.

> They don't

They do, or at least that's what they said.

No, they claimed to be German, and _in that capacity_ responded to their parent.

Not really. bayerrr said to icc97:

> As a German, you could not be more wrong [...]

bayerrr claimed that icc97 was German (this is how this grammatical construction works).

There is an inferred "Speaking as a German", so the author is a letting me know they're German.

But also as you pointed out it makes no sense for them to assume I'm German, but it does make sense if they are German. So I'd just assume the version that makes sense.

> There is an inferred "Speaking as a German", so the author is a letting me know they're German.

Yes, there is the "speaking" part inferred, but the grammar still does not work like that. As a supposedly educated English native speaker, you should know better.

If I said: "As an idiot, you're wrong", I could not possibly claim that I called me an idiot. Why suddenly the subject would change in the very same sentence structure?

[Opinions expressed may not be those of the author]

As a lover of respectful exchanges on here, there's something slightly objectionable about your tone in this thread. As a rather tiresome pedant, you should stop hassling and lecturing people over nothing.

Yes, the original construction "As a German" was kinda awkward, but everyone seems to know what they meant, so why go on about it. Not sure what your problem is. As an intruder to this thread, it's not really my business anyway. As a participant, it's more your domain. As a reader, half of what you say is pretty confusing to me. As an HN-ite, I'm sure you can do better in the future.

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.

> 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.

The UK government has an unhealthy obsession with surveillance but ID cards are a strange target. They offer nothing except convenience, considering if you ever want to buy alcohol or travel abroad as a Brit, then you have to get a driving license and a passport.

The end result is that something as simple as proving who you are on a document, or renewing your driving license, requires that you provide every address you've lived at for 3 years and essentially get a credit check. Electoral roll data is sold to third parties and is used for junk mail as much as it is identity checking.

An ID card would put that entire business venture to an end, because your personal ID number and embedded certificates would be more than enough to prove you are who you say you are. This is comparatively a blessing on the continent, where many EU countries have updated their tech. Being a Brit living around Europe for some years, the hoops I have to jump through to prove who I am in the UK are an incredible annoyance and my letter box is already filling with unwanted solicitations. I'm probably being tracked _more_ than I was with my EU ID cards!

Life with an ID card is nice and easy. But you have no chance of anonymity.

Sure your data gets sold, but if you're careful and you care about it you can keep your anonymity. That's a precious thing that you can never have with ID cards because you're illegal in most of the rest of Europe if you don't have one.

Yes give the police have more excuse to stop and ask for "papers please" guess which type of citizen will be asked for this.

The police don’t do that in the first place, it’s a paranoid myth that ignores the serious infringement on privacy in the UK.

Meanwhile those on an anonymity crusade have to show their phone provider legit ID (driving license, passport) to open up a porn blocker and provide every ID provider in the country evidence of where they’ve lived in 3 years in order to get anywhere. Meanwhile the police push for unfettered access to government databases.

The police aren’t stopping and searching because they need an ID card to ask for. They have plenty to go off already.

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.

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