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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

From the same article, meanwhile, out on the street in public space:

    On a humid day in Bethnal Green, in east London, we joined the police as they positioned a modified white van on the high street.

    Cameras attached to its roof captured thousands of images of people's faces.

    If they matched people on a police watchlist, officers would speak to them and potentially arrest them.

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That seems perfectly reasonable?

Sure, it may be reasonable, it's still worth pointing out that the article is not just about people entering a specific chain of shops, it's also mentioning police vans sitting in the middle of pedestrian concourses outside such shops doing the same face scanning.

It places a burden on someone to somehow prove their innocence, if they can. What if a person refused to speak to the police?

Or what about this? A man covered his face when walking past one of these vans in a public street. He protested and was then fined £90 for swearing (swearing is not illegal but The Pubic Order Act is another law that is often abused by police but that's tangential)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/facial-recogniti...

This is the same burden a person would be under if a police officer simply noticed someone on the street who looked like a wanted suspect (without computer assistance). I agree that the automated system makes this situation more likely to occur, but it has always been the case that you can potentially be arrested because you look a bit like someone else. And in that situation you would have to do your best to convince the police officer that you were in fact someone else.

That's generally why you're only required to provide ID to police in the US (at least in a car. Don't think you can force anyone off the street to show ID). The right to remain silent, or to deny entry into your home cannot put you on a Arrest list.

Of course, all this assume US police have consequences for breaking the rules. So this is unfortunately moot.

No difference at all from the US here. If a police officer in the US recognizes you as being someone for whom there is an outstanding arrest warrant then they can arrest you. And of course, they could be mistaken.

You act less arrest warrants these days stop the police from arresting someone. That's part of the problem.

Dragnet surveillance meets fishing operation. I do not find it so reasonable.

It's perfectly reasonable to harvest thousands of photos of unknowing people and then accost them based on faulty software that can produce an erroneous match? How so?

Nothing in OPs post said anything about accosting people or using faulty software to drive that interaction.

Simply going out looking for people of interest in east London is perfectly fine, we call it "police work" and have done it for bloody ages.

Maybe instead we could issue officers with a deck of cards with 52 faces on them and they can use that as a comparison point? Seems pretty inefficient to me but im only a tax paying pleb what would i know.

> Seems pretty inefficient to me

Police surveillance should be inefficient. People do not exist to be arbitrarily inspected at scale; it should be an expensive, manual process and you should be forced to choose carefully whom you target, by necessity keeping that list small and limited to those for whom you can articulate cause.

I'm sorry but i strongly disagree.

If you're taking money from the public and spending it you should be legally bound to use it in the most efficient and effective way possible.

The most efficient way to survey is to not survey. Nothing more efficient than 0 runtime overhead.

Snark aside, surveys are quite literally the least efficient means of gathering a sample. Scanning random people on the street when a known criminal is likely to lay low and stay inside. I can't imagine expensive surveillance cameras is cheaper than paying an investigator to track down a suspect.

It sounds like they had weren't looking for any specific person (just anyone on "the watchlist") and they were simply mass processing faces to find potential matches.

Let's ignore the privacy implications as not all countries have an expectation of privacy outside windowless closed private spaces. How is this meaningfully different from a general stop and frisk policy? Sure, this adds a non-physical filter before the physical police interaction but it's still a widespread warrantless search. How does this work with the presumption of innocence?

The counterpoint would be to ask how this is meaningfully different from a group of police officers standing on the street comparing the faces they see to a set of photos of known suspects. The efficiency of the automated system obviously makes it feel very different. However, fundamentally, being arrested for looking like someone else is not a new phenomenon. I do not like what is going on here, but I’m not sure that your particular line of argument against it is very strong.

Same deal as LLMs. Police don't get to automatically input facial data into a database when on the streets.

If there was some guarantee all that data wasn't going into some government sanctioned back end, we can start to compare it to police out on the street.

>However, fundamentally, being arrested for looking like someone else is not a new phenomenon.

Was always wrong and still is wrong.

But if you want a modern difference: companies these days (even minimum wage) are really strict about arrests. Even a false arrest can cause complications in a background check, so there is more potential (albeit indirect) slanderous effects from mistaking people nowadays.

> Was always wrong and still is wrong.

I don’t understand this comment. The police sometimes have to arrest people based on descriptions and other fallible data points. It’s unfortunate when the wrong person is arrested (and false arrests should obviously be minimized), but it’s not reasonable to expect police to get this right absolutely 100% of the time. If someone is a fugitive then they are very unlikely to reveal any information that identifies them with certainty.

Also, police in the US use the same technology: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_informa...

It's not reasonable to be 100% correct, no. But given current police conduct in the US I trust them less than ever to try and resolve wrongdoings when it comes up. It's not even "oops" level anymore.

It's always been wrong and still is wrong, but the reasons changed over the years. Americans have traditionally been adverse to mass surveillance and I don't think that changes much today. The government just does it in sneaker ways nowadays.

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