In Canada I rarely see any evidence of surveillance outside of the cities. Public transit being the exception.
Weirdly, the one time I genuinely felt uncomfortable was last week. I saw a traffic camera* swivel across a junction. Actually seeing a camera move in such a way that it was clearly being operated by a human was genuinely unnerving. I took a wrong turn so it wouldn't see me, for no real reason.
*One of these things: https://d1ix0byejyn2u7.cloudfront.net/drive/images/uploads/p...
At least here in Northern Ireland the traffic cameras can be viewed by the public with either a live video feed or regularly updating images.
Maybe because, as most UK citizens (at least the ones I've spoke to about this), you know that most non traffic cameras are not under police control, but under the control of the establishment that installed them, bars, pubs, stadiums, office buildings etc and the police has to provide a good enough reason, via a warrant, to actually see the footage.
There is also the matter of logistics, to connect every camera in say, London, to a central location to process the data, you would need a crapload of infra that doesn't exists at the moment. Not to mention how much processing power you would need to use this tech for every camera.
I believe the most vocal voices to sort out the false positives will be the police themselves. Deploying the stormtroopers for false positives, a few times per day, is not going to sit well with them.
I knew a Mexican citizen who was a legal green card holder in the US. Unfortunately his name was a match to a fugitive on the most wanted list. Every US entry involved an hour long interview to confirm his identity.
This is what machine vision will to to everyone with its false positives.
That's definitely an impossible scenario, because it's not sustainable to interrogate every entrant into the country for an hour. So it's likelier that the ML algorithm will acquire bias to tone down the likelihood of false positive (at the tradeoff of occasional false negatives).
On paper the UK is living in some of the most authoritarian times in modern history. Post 9/11 is a completely different world across much of western society, we have less freedom in many respects. It's almost a trope to say we've given up freedom for the illusion of security. Quality of life isn't entirely represented by how many cars you can afford. I feel like we live in constant fear of terrorism, war, and so on. And yet we never actually get close to these perma-wars, they exist entirely in the press and on TV. I mean, how much Orwellian prophecy do you need before you recognize you are worse off than before?
Orwell assumed a system with a lot of power that was also unaccountable and heavily abused by those in control of it. UK government is neither of those things; they have elections more often than the US does.
I'm personally of the opinion that people take 1984 as prophetic gospel when there are multiple scenarios that include mass ubiquitous surveillance that could come to pass. David Brin looks through several alternatives in "The Transparent Society" that seem to reflect more closely the nature of the modern world.
Assuming the worst-case scenario is as much an anti-pattern for planning as assuming the best-case scenario.
From "The Transparent Society" Wiki page (I have not read the book)
> Brin argues that a core level of privacy—protecting our most intimate interactions—may be preserved,
The UK govt. has already invaded intimate interactions, to the point that they got hauled into a Human Rights court
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/uk-surveillance-regime...
I mean, how much more are you going to accept before they finally come for you?
Your example is the UK government being roped in by HUDOC, so I believe my answer is "Wake me when the UK isn't answerable to HUDOC."
In particular, the example you've cited is unauthorized and unjustified collection of private correspondence (intercepted communications), not collection of images of people in public and comparison of those images against persons of interest (a thing already legal to do by hand via human operators, which the computer algorithm merely speeds up). Private correspondence is private; why should people believe that their public movements should be so?
This is basically the 'finally they came for me' argument I was making. You will sleep in until it's too late is what you are suggesting.
> the example you've cited is unauthorized and unjustified collection of private correspondence
This was my point contradicting "The Transparent Society"'s optimistic POV.
I give up.
For example, HUDOC acts as oversight for the risk of overreach of the UK's police apparatus. Given that such oversight exists, the addition of facial recognition to do what the UK camera network is designed to do already (but faster and with programmable parameters) is probably acceptable. The benefits are clear and the risk mitigated by oversight.