Facial recognition rolled out by London police sparking human rights concerns

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.

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.

That's not a joke.

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".

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?

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.