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UK's First Permanent Facial Recognition Cameras Installed (theregister.com) 55

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The Metropolitan Police has confirmed its first permanent installation of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras is coming this summer and the location will be the South London suburb of Croydon. From a report: The two cameras will be installed in the city center in an effort to combat crime and will be attached to buildings and lamp posts on North End and London Road. According to the police they will only be turned on when officers are in the area and in a position to make an arrest if a criminal is spotted. The installation follows a two-year trial in the area where police vans fitted with the camera have been patrolling the streets matching passersby to its database of suspects or criminals, leading to hundreds of arrests. The Met claims the system can alert them in seconds if a wanted wrong'un is spotted, and if the person gets the all-clear, the image of their face will be deleted.

UK's First Permanent Facial Recognition Cameras Installed More | Reply

UK's First Permanent Facial Recognition Cameras Installed

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  • Keep your masks on (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Thursday March 27, 2025 @12:13PM (#65263001)
    If you need any more reason to keep masked-up.
    • I can't find the link because they're all about anti-recognition masks, but facial recognition generally works on masked people unless it's specifically designed to foil it, and usually even then.
      • I'm getting up there in the years so I've got minor cataracts, not enough to be worth doing the surgery but enough that sunlight fucks with my eyes so I wear those big old man glasses over my main glasses. Add to that the n95 mask I wear when I'm out and about because I don't want to catch anything again. And finally on a cold day my bald head gets cold and I wear a hoodie.

        It was especially funny when COVID first broke because I only had a old cloth mask with a scary skull on it I used to use for cyclin
    • To wear a mask. In America particularly that can be scary because any interaction with the police officer can end with you getting shot and killed. Even if we dial that down a bit you could still wind up being arrested and having all sorts of problems because of it.

      I don't know about the rest of the world but one of the problems America has is a crime continues to go down but we believe it's going up so we keep hiring more and more and more police.

      So you've got huge swaths of cops with the job of fi

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        >because any interaction with the police officer can end with you getting shot and killed

        No they don't. Stop with this narrative. Maybe you need to stop speeding because you seem to have gotten a few tickets and are now the perpetual victim.

        • The narrative is not far off though. "Arrested" is more reasonable, which is a pretty scary experience, as is simply being detained when going about your day. Police escalate situations very, very fast and seem more indiscriminate about it now. I work with various government departments in my small town weekly, and it is honestly a little surprising the lack of customer service and lack of sense by officers that they paid by the taxpayer, especially if they are challenged in their thinking. No other governm

          • What would fix it is Federally funded training, where a police officer job was turned into a truly professional occupation.

            Lets take an officer from Germany. They pretty much have a master's degree in criminal justice. Or a British bobby with a year of hand to hand, unarmed combat training.

            What needs to be done is give officers more training, and this has to come from the Federal government on down since local governments don't have the cash for it. This would be a good thing overall, not just in being a

            • We already have that. One of the dirty little tricks we use to hide just how much we spend on police in America is to have the funding come from federal grants. State ones too. If you look at your police budget it doesn't look that bad because that's the line item your city is paying but if you look at the actual amount of money they're spending it's typically about half what your city has available to it.

              Honestly if the left wing didn't suck so much they would be pointing out how shitty a value proposi
      • Ah... you drank the acb narrative cocktail, and went back for more.

      • So you've got huge swaths of cops with the job of finding criminals but not nearly enough criminals for them to arrest. And like everything they've got stats for how many people they arrest.

        They've fixed that problem now. People who aren't citizens - along with many people who ARE citizens but look as though they just might not be - are getting arrested. Yay for xenophobia!

        • You're run of the mill beat cop still has to meet his quota. The red states that let them just do it by rounding up random brownish people also don't have hardly any random brownish people. They chased them away years ago and they use prisoners to do the work they used to have immigrants do.

          As a result just being white isn't really enough to protect you from the police anymore like it used to be.

      • It was criminalized as a means of arresting Ku Klux Klan members, back in the day.

        "Once you've built the big machinery of political power, remember you won't always be the one to run it." -- P. J. O'Rourke

    • There are ways around that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sark666 ( 756464 )

      I could imagine one day they would couple it with gait analysis. if they ever capture the person without a mask, they could use gait analysis to match them.

  • Minority Report? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Thursday March 27, 2025 @12:23PM (#65263021) Journal

    "John Anderton. You could use a Guinness right about now."

  • This is why I swap mine out.

  • and the tracking database? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "and if the person gets the all-clear, the image of their face will be deleted."

    But will the record of their presence be deleted?

    • If anybody believes a false match will be deleted after they've been accosted and forced to prove they aren't who the system identified them as, I've got a whole range of bridges for sale at knockdown prices.

  • https://www.reflectacles.com/ [reflectacles.com] If everybody start wearing them, it would be a prove that pervert goverment's intention is to waste your tax dollars.

  • There's more than one down side to surveillance (Score:3)

    by hyades1 ( 1149581 ) on Thursday March 27, 2025 @01:17PM (#65263135)

    I wonder if the British constabulary kept their video of me having a long, relaxing piss in Russell Square's park. I looked up about half way through the leak, right into a surveillance camera I hadn't realized was there. I figured they'd already seen everything there was to see, so there was no point in trying to choke things off in midstream. So I took my time, gave the ol' snake a couple of shakes, zipped up, and gave a jaunty wave to the camera before I headed off to the hotel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      I wonder if the British constabulary kept their video of me having a long, relaxing piss in Russell Square's park. I looked up about half way through the leak, right into a surveillance camera I hadn't realized was there. I figured they'd already seen everything there was to see, so there was no point in trying to choke things off in midstream. So I took my time, gave the ol' snake a couple of shakes, zipped up, and gave a jaunty wave to the camera before I headed off to the hotel.

      As long as you're shouting "I'm in pain" at the same time, you're golden.

      • I may have screwed up. If I said anything at all, it would have been, "Ahh...much better!" In the appropriate Duke voice, of course.

  • Wonder if this would be legal if they were still in the EU?

  • some things that block it (Score:3)

    by ZipNada ( 10152669 ) on Thursday March 27, 2025 @02:23PM (#65263285)

    ... but you have to decide if you want to wear these things.

    https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]

  • While I wholeheartedly support the right to privacy and anonymity at home, this is public space and using cameras to fish out known criminals from the crowd is just a sensible and efficient thing to do. The police forces are outnumbered and criminals parade in bright daylight like they own the place, without fear of being caught. We should be using any and every means necessary to identify and lock them up.

    • While I wholeheartedly support the right to privacy and anonymity at home, this is public space and using cameras to fish out known criminals from the crowd is just a sensible and efficient thing to do. The police forces are outnumbered and criminals parade in bright daylight like they own the place, without fear of being caught. We should be using any and every means necessary to identify and lock them up.

      To the extent that reducing crime is good I think this is a good idea. But I think there's something lost as well.

      I remember golfing with my dad in the 90s, before smart phones and even before a lot of businesses were digitized.

      There's no digital record of those games or where we were, probably not even an analog one, my dad is passed so those outings only exist in my memory. There's something comforting in that as well. All the stupid tantrums I threw on the course as a frustrated kid are also lost to time

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      While I wholeheartedly support the right to privacy and anonymity at home, this is public space and using cameras to fish out known criminals from the crowd is just a sensible and efficient thing to do. The police forces are outnumbered and criminals parade in bright daylight like they own the place, without fear of being caught. We should be using any and every means necessary to identify and lock them up.

      This is to say, in the UK we don't have an adversarial relationship between the Police forces and the general public. The Police realise that they're here to help, assist and serve the general public whilst the general public hold them accountable. With the extra power we give police, we also load them with extra responsibility and they carry that responsibility well. It still amuses me that the US police with all their guns and armour are not expected to lay down their lives in the course of their duties,

  • The simple issue is whether you trust government to govern its own behavior. The first step to tyranny is answering that question in the affirmative.

    If you aren't on the list your face isn't saved. But who decides who is on the list? Was that tattoo really a symbol of a Venezuela gang or just a popular soccer team? Are you keeping faces of people who committed criminal acts or everyone at the opposition rally? Not only who decides what is abuse of power, but who enforces whatever limits are set.

    American li

  • I favor any and all use of tech to catch real criminals, and by real, I mean those who commit robbery, vandalism or violence

    I oppose giving police the power to harass innocent citizens who may be a bit different or who are expressing unpopular opinions

    Problem is, the tech is neutral and once police have it, it's impossible to control

  • "two cameras [...] will be attached to buildings and lamp posts". How it is possible if there are only two of them?

  • If you scan a thousand British faces and compare them to a thousand criminals, you will do 1,000,000 comparisons. (that's the birthday paradox part).
    If your error rate is 0.8%, you'll get roughly 8,000 false positives and negatives.
    That's bad enough if they are all false positives: people get arrested, then released.
    It's way worse if they are all false negatives: 8,000 criminals get ignored by the police dragnet.

    That was Britain: false positives are life-threatening in countries where the police carry

  • This is only to catch criminals, right?
    BULLSHIT
    If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear - where have i read that before?
    Only oblivious idiots could fail to see where this is going....

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