Central Londoners to be subjected to facial recognition test this week

I smell a market for facial prosthetics (good ones) and sunglasses. Maybe large hats.

Maybe gp is referring to the extremely classist nature of UK culture? One of my best friends who got his Bachelors in the US but then did his masters at Cambridge explained to me that egalitarianism basically doesn't exist in reality there. They denied him his application for PhD, while the professor who read it stole his idea and made it his own... and this was to a dual American/British citizen. When I visited, I was taken aback at how snobby and disdainful of the plebs people at Oxford were. To me as an American who had made British military friends during the war that seemed awesome, it was really shocking how dystopian the UK was, and not just the massive government surveillance, (for example, imsi catching in The City stole my GPS signal for a few hours at one point) it felt much more like a thin veneer over oligarchical neofuedalism even the plebs participated in. There may not be an official social credit system (yet), but Brits are good at knowing it without the card.

We have driving licences and passports which are used as such. Not compulsory but pretty much essential unless you want to live off the grid for all your life.

I'm guessing this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#United_Ki...

Today in London, Richard Nixon was seen at 37 coffee shops, 18 shoe shops, and even buying a Lambo.

But that's at least illegal. If it's inadmissible, they won't likely get funded. And if they try that, it's fruit of the poisonous tree and a good lawyer should be able to ferret that out.

I didn't say it's a perfect solution. But it might at least help.

No. I don't care how long they're keeping it. The problem is that governments have databases of citizens. The problem of governments is that they want to blow a hole in previous ideas of "assumption of privacy". Lots of people around the world have trusted governments in the past. Many of them are dead. If you haven't guessed, I don't trust the government. But I think that's with good reason. I don't believe any regulation can solve this problem. The government itself should regulate its own use of something? Like that's worked before.

Keep this away from me. My concern is only secondarily that someone using my data to run ads. My concern is primarily that government should never have access to such a tool.

> those who can create this software should damn well be working to make sure it does work and is not easily thwarted by those in power or abused by them

That work begins with thinking about it seriously, and it's obvious by now this can't be left up to software devs exclusively.

I could probably find you dozens of threads on HN about the web being bloated, with hundreds of comments just saying it's "impossible" to make a half-decent website because of what the "boss" or "the marketing dept" tells devs. Like, the web isn't shit because of devs, but because they don't call the shots. And that's just the web. People who can't even stand up to, and face down, people who aren't even cold-blooded killers -- will "make sure" that... "is not easily thwarted by those in power or abused by them". Oh, so to make it impossible, just not "easy"...? This means nothing, you cannot even commit in a text comment. Because you know it's impossible to make it impossible. It's like saying the scientists who worked on the nuke should have made sure it could not be used for nuclear war.

I think it would be more effective to flip the script socially, instead of being so defensive. In practice, for most people, the data generated on them doesn't matter much, yet -- but other data data also gets generated: who is being a snoop, who is working with snoops, who is pushing for mass surveillance, who is rationalizing or belittling it, who ever changed their mind, and who didn't. So much data, and that data might stick around forever, too. How will the future judge it? That data we can and should make matter, and that's purely social, a matter of education and backbone, not technology or money. Though of course it has to be parallel with legal and technical efforts, not in place of them, I think the "social dimension" (which begins with individuals, not groups, groups of people that skipped the "individual" step are empty) it's very important and very underrated, a blind spot even.

So I say, step one is realizing that you are not the obedient shadow of a human being, you're not the one creeping in the shadow being a voyeur or even a slave to fascists... and the the pitiful things those see about you really are pitiful in light to what they don't even know about themselves, much less about you. If Gulliver lets himself by hypnotized and put to sleep, sure, then it all goes south -- but otherwise, it's not even a contest.

> It doesn't matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.

> But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.

> It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.

-- Adam Curtis

I mean, let's ignore actual national security stuff for a second, practice dividing real things from abusive, infantile bullshit by engaging with marketing in a more confident and hostile manner. That also begins in the head. Don't feel degraded by what marketing tells you, realize what pathetic things it says about those putting it in front of you. What kind of secrets, nay, fears would one hide behind such a giant apparatus, be it technical, organisatory, or via systems of bloated and diluted language? How are people who consent to that not weak in turn? Let the "top 10% of the world who cannot say yes" say "no" in unison, and the rest of the world, where 5 people can't even agree with each other, would shake and crumble to dust. 700 million serious people would scare the world shitless.

Pleading with doinks means you haven't fully realized they are doinks and should do that first. Considering the weak people the even weaker people in question take orders from, they would so fall in line if the public just so much as collectively cleared its throat. Again, think Gulliver. That just needs to actually happen, and that starts with doing it wherever you are, regardless of what anyone else does. "Be the change that needs to happen in the world for it to not go under", at this point.

The thing about tradeoffs is, they only even accumulate insofar as you ever strayed from this path. Otherwise, you just accumulate "not having given in" time on the clock, and might not even be tempted to trade that for some creature comforts and sweaty handshakes from doinks. I don't know what a doink is, but I love that word. It's supposed to be playfully demeaning. Spooks and their "crowd" are just lost, they probably need our help more than anything. But that starts with giving them boundaries instead of power, and that starts with knowing your own worth, trying to be good so that being good can be good to you (which it will). Appeasing abusers does not lead to peace. Study examples in history as well as psychopathology, there's plenty. Mind you, escalation and unfairness doesn't lead to peace or improvements, either... by "appeasing" I mean buying into all of it, being obedient for the hopes of mercy. This does not work, it really achieves the opposite. Be firm but fair, and never fear.

Are they now legally allowed to use a facial recognition match as grounds for reasonable suspicion?

GDPR will still apply, at least for a while - https://www.itpro.co.uk/policy-legislation/31772/gdpr-and-br...

Plus it'll still apply to European citizens, won't it? And I'm reasonably sure there's more than a non-zero number of those in Central London on any given day.

> "processing is necessary in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of another natural person"

ICO says "The processing must be necessary. If you can reasonably protect the person’s vital interests in another less intrusive way, this basis will not apply." which cuts out that excuse because, since I'm not dead and the majority of Londoners are also not dead, the police seem to be "reasonably protect[ing]" our "vital interests in another less intrusive way".

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...

I try to cover up as much as I can. Sunglasses are a good idea.

Regarding sunglasses in Berlin, police stopped me on my e-moped recently and forced me into a restaurant bathroom to do a pee test for drugs, and they told me the reason was that I wore sunglasses when riding and thus looked suspicious. I wear then to protect my eyes from dust and bugs. I was absolutely sober, and going home from church. My takeaway is, Berlin police want your face.

At first I thought this comment was just funny, then I had the thought that it's actually plausible, then it hit me that it's not only plausible but inevitable.

No, but it doesn't matter: trivial and quick to make your own database, and with cellphone cams getting better and better, it'll be more and more accurate and good luck detecting someone doing this.