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Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England
Related: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/uk_expands_police_facial_recognition/
- conartist6 1y agoIf you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. We are going to be hearing that argument a lot as the AI police state evolves
- ebiester 1y agoAnd you’re not trans. And you don’t perform drag. And you don’t go to an event with a lot of gay people. And you don’t get mistaken for someone because ai isn’t perfect. (Especially if your race doesn’t have many people in the dataset.) But the people that don’t have anything to fear don’t see anything wrong with “inconveniencing” these groups.
- spwa4 1y agoThis is the UK, and it's the police controlling these vans. So trans, drag and gay are not at issue here. And somehow, the countries where it is a problem are never discussed. All muslim countries, for example, almost like not all religions are equal ... if you read hrw or amnesty you'll find that even the most moderate muslim countries like Morocco or Turkey deal violently with sexuality (all forms, really, yes, being trans drag will, of course, attract immediate attention. But let's not pretend they leave public displays of straight sexuality (including subtle and tasteful) alone). And Morocco and Turkey are absolutely nothing like something like Afghanistan or even Iran. But in the UK the line is drawn pretty damn far. Are you seriously complaining about that?
- ivell 1y agoI guess at present the UK is very tolerant. But no one can predict the future. It can go downhill. Even for developed western countries. Once surveillance is setup, it is hard to restrict its usage. Especially when the society gets used to it.
- voidUpdate 1y agoNot for trans people, especially trans women
- ebiester 1y agoI'm in particular speaking about the UK, actually. consider how much anti-trans backlash there has been in the country. Consider how in Weimar Germany there was a fair bit of acceptance for the LGBT community that was quickly undone - all it takes is a charismatic leader or a king that goes along with it.
- EliRivers 1y agoI have so much to hide. I want to hide what I had for breakfast. I want to hide what books I read recently. I want to hide which TV shows I watch. I want to hide who I have conversations with. I want to hide who I avoid. I engage in so much completely legal behaviour, much of it quite laudable, that I simply want to hide.
- scoot 1y agoLaudable, or laughable? I only ask because "laudable" didn't quite seem to fit with most of the examples you gave.
- TomasBM 1y ago"It's not that I have something to hide. It's that I have nothing I want you to see." A great quote from an otherwise OK movie ("Anon").
- kbos87 1y agoThe couple of times I’ve even done as little as fly through Heathrow it has been apparent to me that the UK is on its way to becoming an unfettered surveillance state, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
- oniony 1y agoWe're too scared to talk about it lest our faces get added to a list.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- EA-3167 1y agoYou say "on its way" as if it hasn't been at the forefront of this for decades. Until China and post-9/11 US ramped up facial recognition and CCTV projects MASSIVELY, the UK didn't just have more CCTV units per capita than anywhere else on Earth, they had the most in absolute terms. Even now last I checked the UK has about 1 camera for every 11 people.
- SV_BubbleTime 1y agoSingapore should have that beat. I’m not saying the UK isn’t nuts for CCTV, it’s just that Sg feels like it is on another level.
- HKH2 1y agoSingapore has a much lower crime rate though.
- i_love_retros 1y agoWhat did you witness or experience flying via Heathrow that made it apparent to you?
- drcongo 1y agoI'm so embarrassed to be British these days. We're a small island of small minded people.
- potato3732842 1y agoSmall mindedness (to use your words, though I think other sets of words are perhaps more descripitive) is a condition that spreads like the plague. If you don't constantly stamp it out through ostracizing and marginalizing the infected and those who intentionally create the conditions for it then you will be overrun.
- mrangle 1y agoAre your ideas not good enough to persuade?
- chownie 1y agoIf "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now, instead the means of persuasion are owned by psychopaths who continually convince the public to vote self-destructively. The enshittification of society continues.
- mrangle 1y ago>If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now If I have this right: your measurement for whether or not people are in their right mind is if they take to your specific ideas? Have you considered the possibility that people are most often persuaded by good ideas and your ideas are awful? And insofar as you present them in an ostensibly good light, you are lying somewhere in the presentation and people can see that. To be clear, your perspective is that everyone else is a psychopath or so much dumber than you, personally, as to be led by psychopaths. And it's not you that's dumber than most others, nor who is led by the psychopath(s), nor who is the psychopath that needs to advance their ideas by marginalizing people who have other ideas. And the strategy is to marginalize people because...checks notes... your ideas are unpalatable to the population. For no good reason. Why are your ideas unpalatable to the population, from their perspective? Any good policy wonk will know that much, will be able to explain the opposition's reasons accurately and in detail, and will be able to steel-man their own argument utilizing that perspective. Whereas a manipulative person will avoid that level of analysis.
- beardyw 1y ago10 vans works out at one for every 10,000 square miles. Hardly a "roll out across the UK".
- holsta 1y ago> Hardly a "roll out across the UK". What's your threshold for when it becomes a problem? Should we wait until it becomes a problem, or should we try to stop this level of facial recognition? You should also assume this is a proof of concept. It'll get improved and scaled down to run on every police vehicle, and on every camera the police already control.
- spwa4 1y agoIt has already been scaled down to android phones (you'll find phones are an excellent platform for this), where you can find apps that are meant to let venue-owners guard entrances against specific individuals. That's illegal, but obviously common enough to make such apps.
- extraisland 1y agoIt is the "Thin end of the wedge". Then it will be sold to the public as being successful (they are already claiming that in the article itself that it is successful). Then that will be used to justify them in other places.
- davesmylie 1y agoWell, that's some distopean shit right there ain't it
- drcongo 1y agoFrom the country that brought you vans telling immigrants to "GO HOME OR FACE ARREST" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Go_Home%22_vans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Go_Home%22_vans
- philipallstar 1y agoNot immigrants. Illegal immigrants.
- josefritzishere 1y agoColonial powers are not entitled to that argument, it's hypocritical.
- rangestransform 1y agoThey are entitled to that argument by virtue of having guns and borders. I would rather be hypocritical than have my government expend resources on other countries altruistically
- philipallstar 1y ago> Colonial powers are not entitled to that argument, it's hypocritical. Yes they are. Everyone everywhere has invaded or otherwise traded their way into power in other countries (or pre-country equivalents). It's extremely foolish to bucket the world into Britain and not-Britain if one isn't entirely ignorant of history.
- coldtea 1y agoDid the people suffering the consequences of illegal immigration today performed that colonialism? Not even their ancestors at colonial times benefitted much from it: the industrial working class of Britain was in dire position despite Britain being a colonial Empire. That money and power went to the ruling classes and their middle class bootlickers.
- sidewndr46 1y agoDoesn't the UK have cameras everywhere doing this anyways?
- spwa4 1y agoNope. They started a long time ago with the cameras and didn't upgrade them, because money. Which means a pretty large part of the cameras have pathetic resolution and are black and white, as well as being too far away from much of their vision. Useful for locating protestors sorry ("getting a general idea of criminal activity"), not so useful for recognizing anyone.
- sidewndr46 1y agoThat is interesting because it implies either the UK's camera infrastructure has simply amazing reliability with parts never failing. Or it could be that they have huge stocks of the hardware that they haven't yet exhausted.
- JonChesterfield 1y agoOr that when they fail, they get left up anyway
- foldr 1y agoNot really. The UK government does not operate a centrally-controlled CCTV surveillance system, contrary to popular myth. There are a lot of privately owned cameras (but no reliable estimates of how many), and some local authorities, police forces, etc. operate CCTV cameras in certain locations. If you actually dig in to the statistics that sometimes get quoted about CCTV in the UK you’ll find that a lot of the numbers have very little foundation.
- arethuza 1y agoHN title is wrong - the article title says "...across police forces in England".
- oniony 1y agoIt's not wrong as England is within the UK: it's just not as precise as it could have been.
- arethuza 1y agoHN Guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"
- thebruce87m 1y agoThe changed title is actually misleading since it includes three other countries that didn’t appear in the original.
- amarcheschi 1y agoThat's on me, i made a mistake when writing the title
- tomhow 1y agoThanks! We've changed the title now.
- Shank 1y agoThe UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
- buyucu 1y agoEvery accusation from the West towards China is an admission of guilt. It is called projection: accusing others of what you actually are doing.
- elric 1y agoThey've been doing this for years at protests, using "Forward Intelligence Teams". Even back in 2010 [1] there was an action group trying to protest this growing police-state (Fitwatch). The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember. Must be a truly dangerous place... https://web.archive.org/web/20100824175032/http://fitwatch.org.uk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100824175032/http://fitwatch.o...
- crimsoneer 1y agoThe fact the UK police deploy teams with cameras to record crime is really not the dystopian hellscape Fitwatch like to make out it is.
- jon-wood 1y agoThe CCTV cameras I've never really had a problem with - despite what TV shows and films would like to tell you they're not actually a single coherent CCTV network, a vast proportion of them are operated by random shopkeepers, private home owners, and other such places. If they want footage from them the police are typically going to have to send someone out to ask for it, and then hope they haven't reused the storage already. This sort of thing, deploying facial recognition systems in the street in the hope of finding someone, is much more insidious. Technically you can choose to bypass it, or pull something over your face, but that's more or less guaranteeing that you'll be stopped and questioned as to why you're concerned about it. Sadly the UK never met an authoritarian they didn't like (apart from Hitler, so long as you're not as bad as Hitler himself you're good though). When surveyed the British public will call for banning basically anything they don't like, even if it doesn't impact them at all.
- josefritzishere 1y agoThe UK is broke but has infinite money for a surveillance state.
- echelon_musk 1y agoOne justification for increased surveillance is that it is cheaper than hiring police officers.
- righthand 1y agoIs it if equipment maintenance and building/installing costs keep going up? Replacing police officers is about removing a human decision element from lower class suppression.
- OhioMan2943 1y agoask yourself why.
- Husieandr 1y ago[flagged]
- bbqfog 1y agoThousands of children aren't being assaulted, unless you count by Jimmy Saville and his friends.
- jadamson 1y agoThe comment you're replying to isn't greatly helpful, but neither is yours. Rotherham alone, a town of ~250k people, had an estimated 1,400 victims. Then there's Rochdale, Oxford, Telford, Huddersfield, Derby...
- bbqfog 1y agoYes, it's well known that UK police and politicians have abused children at scale, hence why Saville was able to get away with what he did. He was protected by the crown. There are even pictures of Ghislane Maxwell and Kevin Spacey sitting on the throne (can google it).
- jadamson 1y agoThe grooming gangs in those towns consisted of men from a variety of occupations, though a clear pattern was the involvement of takeaways and taxi firms. The involvement of police and politicians was mostly limited to denial, dismissal, and cover-up. Although there have been individual allegations against local politicians[1] and police[2], they do little to help your case here. There certainly were thousands of victims, and I'm not clear why you'd deny that. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/26/rotherham-grooming-trial-victim-claims-she-was-raped-by-town-councillor https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/26/rotherham-gr... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9y0lvpyqvo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9y0lvpyqvo
- bbqfog 1y ago
- jl6 1y ago> Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology. Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
- grepnork 1y agoCurrently, the police are catching up with shopping centres and entertainment chains who've been using this tech for years. The Police themselves have been using facial recognition to scrub tapes for far longer than LFR. Amusingly, the firm the gazanaughts have been complaining was being used to spy on Palestinians was recently sold to an American Parking Lot operator. The time to complain about high street facial rec sailed by a decade ago.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- scoot 1y agoWhere is this quote from? I couldn't see it in the article. If true, wouldn't that simply lead to wanted suspects simply avoiding the cameras, meaning innocent people who aren't monitoring these notifications to have their faces and locations captured, while criminals avoid it?
- jacquesm 1y agoOrwell was way too kind.
- southernplaces7 1y agoHe just had no conception of all the fun technologies that would later come along in a digitized, microprocessor-rich world of the future. Reading 1984 today, you want to laught at the simplistic and almost benign weakness of telescreens for surveillance. Were Orwell to have been deeply informed about the surviellance mechanisms of the future, he'd likely be both surprised into horror at their innovative intrusions, and completely unsurprised that such a vast percentage of the UK's (and world's) population completely accepts them with hardly a sigh.
- andrepd 1y agoThe last part wits the nail on the head. Orwell envisioned a future where everyone was forced to have a telescreen watching them at all times. He never for a second dreamed of a future where people would buy a telescreen for the most trifling convenience of going "alexa, is it going to rain today".
- maxwell 1y agoHuxley and Bradbury did.
- southernplaces7 1y agoThis is actually why I always considered Brave New World to be much closer in predicting the future, at least in spirit if not in hard details. Let people access personal distractions, conveniences and pleasures on your road to total surveillance, and attempts at social control, and you can apply them with very little need to ever enforce miseries like those of "1984"
- maxwell 1y ago
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- random9749832 1y ago[flagged]
- bbqfog 1y agoThis has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with the UK being a addicted to surveillance. They have a long history of spying on their own citizens.
- rhubarbtree 1y agoMore, the country is approaching an impasse and they know it.
- bbqfog 1y agoWhat kind of impasse?
- immibis 1y agoThe country hasn't produced anything of real value in decades - its economy is entirely held together by selling money laundering services to the rich - which brings in an enormous amount of money in percentage fees, but is only available to a few people. Since the money involved is so large, this crowds out actual production.
- account42 1y ago[flagged]
- extraisland 1y ago> The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias. I feel so much better! /sarcasm How tone deaf can they be? Whenever there are serious privacy concerns about how this sort of technology, you have a statement like attached. It doesn't address what people are worried about. They never directly address it.
- epanchin 1y agoThe vast majority of newspaper articles/videos about this tech relate to innocent black people being flagged. Racism is certainly the biggest concern of the media, which may or may not reflect the publics general concern.
- extraisland 1y agoI was listening to an interview with Dominic Cummings while walking this evening. It was about two hours long. I don't really know what to make of Dominic Cummings, I did think it would be interesting to hear his perspective. During the interview he explained how many people in the government essentially wanted to please their own, which includes their own class of people (city people essentially) and the media. He said that ministers were much more worried about how media was covering them, than anything else. The same people essentially see see the normal general public and people like myself as criminal. They see us a criminal because by in large much of the general public and people like myself don't agree with them. This sort of statement is very "on brand" if what he said is true.
- dathinab 1y agoWell there had been system with very high rates of false positives for certain ethnicities which if wide scale deployed would in effect be like systematic harassment of this people. So it is a thing people which in general are okay with mass surveillance might worried about. And convincing the people you have a chance to convince is much more useful the pointlessly trying to convince the people which anyway won't like what you do no matter what you say.
- throwaway22032 1y agoAs a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere. The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police. The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time. There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
- spacebanana7 1y agoThe British state is actually very effective at doing what it wants to do - it just doesn't want to do the things we consider to be 'right'. The government prioritises order over law, liquidity over solvency and the status of our politicians at international dinner parties.
- poszlem 1y agoThey seem to be doing everything except actual policing.
- kypro 1y agoTo be fair they did stop a guy on a skateboard the other day, fined him £300, and gave him 6 points on his non-existent license, https://x.com/JamesHarvey2503/status/1955215331959394764 https://x.com/JamesHarvey2503/status/1955215331959394764 People act like the UK is lawless and people can just steal bikes from public bike rakes, steel food from stores, or even turn up on UK shores illegally and be given 4* hotels, but presumably this isn't true given how strictly they enforce almost completely irrelevent stuff like a dude on an electrified skateboard.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoIt's called anarcho-tyranny. Certain crimes, and certain types of criminal, go unpunished almost as a rule. But it's very easy and not politically inconvenient to harass guys on skateboards, and people who post edgy memes on Facebook are a grave threat to our society, so there you have it.
- throwaway422432 1y agoCorrect. Why do the beat when you can sit at your desk and watch or wait for the cameras to pick something up? They seem to have forgotten that a police presence, i.e. a patrol car cruising around or police walking or cycling the streets not only prevents some crime but makes people feel safer by their visibility.
- mytailorisrich 1y agoIn itself this is a storm in a teacup. The important question, only important question IMHO, is how they handle positives. Do they go all guns blazing and arrest the person on the spot? Or do they use a restrained approach and first nicely ask the person if they have any ID, etc? That's the important bit.
- cmcaleer 1y agoThen what happens if you don't have ID on you (which, for now, is entirely legal in the UK)? What if you're hours from home? Do you then need to completely cancel your day to spend it with the cops instead satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat? What if you refuse to cooperate because you have better things to do than waste your time with the police? I'm sure that'll go well for you. What if your child falls victim to a false identification, and then given that children are far less likely to have some form of ID on them than adults, they're stuck for much longer? Do you trust the British police to take good care of your child? Or will they strip-search her and threaten her with arrest like they did with the then-15-year-old Child Q because they decided that she "smelled of weed"? Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
- mytailorisrich 1y agoWhat happens when a police constable thinks they recognise you from evidence they have in an investigation or a wanted person notice? This is nothing new. It is all about what is reasonable in the circumstances.
- cmcaleer 1y agoA constable is not going to be scanning the faces everyone going to Wembley in one night. Even 100 constables looking at faces entering faces going to Wembley is not going to scan everyone and recognise someone they know from a wanted poster (of maybe a couple hundred faces in their head). The Met have already lied about the scale of false positives[0] by nearly 1000x, and it's not obvious how much better it will get. With the current tech, this rate will get worse as more faces are being looked for. If it's only looking for (I'm guessing) a thousand high-risk targets now and the rate is 1/40, as more and more faces get searched for this problem gets exponentially worse as the risk of feature collisions rise. Of course, it'll also disproportionately affect ethnic groups who are more represented in this database too, making life for honest members of those groups more difficult than it already is. The scale is what makes it different. The lack of accountability for the tech and the false confidence it gives police is what makes it different. [0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945
- mrtksn 1y agoIt appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state. Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught). I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it. The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules. The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work. IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way. Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.
- burkaman 1y agoHonestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.
- mrtksn 1y agoRight, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level. This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations. The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading. What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
- mvieira38 1y agoSao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff [0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhecimento-facial-do-smart-sampa-nao-reduziu-criminalidade-na-cidade-de-sp-diz-estudo.ghtml https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)
- righthand 1y agoI would honestly start looking to flee the UK.
- betaby 1y agoAnd go where? Also how to do that legally? You just can't show up to say Moldova and start living there.
- codedokode 1y agoMost of European Union?
- octo888 1y ago5 years too late for that!
- dathinab 1y agotrying to become a EU member state citizen as a UK citizen is still much easier then for many other countries through often not on paper, but in practice, like the people which can throw rocks in your path do that less likely in the end it's a question of job (in country you want to move to), money/liquidity, and moral restraints you have. Like e.g. buying yourself citizen ship through an arranged marriage should be something like 30k-50k€ depending on EU state, context etc. And that is if you go through organized crime rings which take a cut. And if are rich there probably should be a lot of more legal-ish ways to get citizenship. Some countries outright allow buying citizenship, but I think besides the "buying" cost you need to be quite stacked. And if you have good job qualifications you might get a job in the EU -> long term right to stay -> and then find one way or another to convert it to citizenship. It's probably ethically most upright but also hardest path.
- octo888 1y agoAre you recommending immigration fraud with a straight face?
- johnisgood 1y agoWhat is the point if there are people on many streets with CCTVs doing drugs openly. I saw a cop simply walk by someone overdosing. Nothing will happen. Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me? (Again, what is the point of the down-vote? I am asking for people's thought and opinions in the hope of a fruitful conversation).
- betaby 1y ago> Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me? To haras and punish people disagreeing with the ruling class?
- grepnork 1y agoOut of curiosity exactly who is this ruling class?
- betaby 1y agoLet's say those people for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoThe Conservatives are out of power. They were defeated in the last election.
- grepnork 1y agoYou mean idiots who went to private schools then?
- bevhill 1y agoYou can just say it.
- grepnork 1y agoOverdosing is not a crime, it's not even the job of the Police to help, and possession of drugs is being ignored by most forces because an arrest takes two officers off frontline services for 4 hours, when it will most likely result in a caution.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- TheChaplain 1y agoNever been a better time than now to engage yourself politically.
- OhioMan2943 1y agoNone. We have more to lose and are losing more than ever before.
- andrewmcwatters 1y agoSee also https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle
- Aachen 1y ago^camouflage face paint against facial recognition Some context with a link, beyond "just click this", would be nice
- Simon_O_Rourke 1y agoIf it's used to track folks out on bail or already convicted of violent crimes then great. However seeing what the UK police are like right now it's likely to be applied to harass genteel retirees protesting about Israeli barbarity in Palestine.
- ungreased0675 1y agoIt’s very sad how quickly their culture is devolving. I was in the UK last year and I probably won’t be back. The weirdest thing to me was that all the news stations covered US politics extensively, but said little about domestic politics. Not sure what to make of that.
- ozlikethewizard 1y agoIt's also now the law to remove a face covering when requested by the police (it's supposed to be under certain conditions, but have fun arguing that with a jake). Actually love living in a police state. At least we repealed the law making cable ties illegal I guess.
- arresin 1y agoGod help you if you walk out of a store with a butter knife and forget your receipt.
- a5c11 1y agoSounds funny, unless you are young looking and went to a store without ID to buy a pair of scissors. Happened to me, but I've managed to convince the staff that I'm old enough to cut the letters from a newspaper.
- Someone 1y ago> but I've managed to convince the staff that I'm old enough to cut the letters from a newspaper. So that you can write ransom notes? They should have locked you up.
- crimsoneer 1y agoI mean, yes, if you're in a violent protest the police might ask you to remove your balaclava. Given the current political climate in the US that doesn't feel like the end of days.
- dfawcus 1y agoWe shall have to adopt a new fashion for Australian style cork hats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_hat
- throwaway422432 1y agoYou can get UV protection hats that have a clip-able face cover for those times you just want to go outside for a minute without having to slap on sunscreen. Have a few at home just for that, but they could definitely have a dual-use.
- arresin 1y agoDamn could you link me? That’s exactly what I’m after. Or give me the search terms? Thanks.
- throwaway422432 1y agoHave a look at the Solbari Ultimate Sun Hat UPF 50+
- la_mezcla 1y agoIsn't UK a democracy? Why then have the people not rejected the initiative? Ah, right - they haven't even been asked.
- zamadatix 1y agoI think you'd be surprised how large the public support for these initiatives actually is. E.g. few on HN would guess it aligned with what the public wanted, yet it's hard to find a poll saying that's the case. And I don't just mean "of sleazily worded polls", even when the poll explicitly calls out the privacy concerns or other side effects more want to try the law than not.
- dclowd9901 1y ago"What do I care, I've got nothing to hide."
- typewithrhythm 1y agoMuch of the issue with western democracies is that people assume consistently within their politicians. A pro surveillance party should also address crime. If someone sees crime as a big issue then they will be for the surveillance. Unfortunately what actually happens is that the surveillance is used to track anti government sentiment, while the crime is not any more prioritised than before the surveillance.
- Starlevel004 1y agoBecause the curtain-twitching UK public loves this sort of stuff?
- laughing_man 1y agoThe frustration I've had in the US, and I known has been felt by friends from the UK, is that no matter who you vote for or what they promise it seems you always get more of the same.
- crinkly 1y agoIt's representative democracy so we can choose which party who will misrepresent us. Then choose another one which will misrepresent us. It's about time that idea was crushed and we moved to voting on policies rather than parties and personalities. There isn't a one size fits all party.
- dang 1y agoRelated: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/uk_expands_police_facial_recognition/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/uk_expands_police_fac... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887373, but we merged that thread hither)
- kleiba 1y agoThey should have stayed in the EU.
- physarum_salad 1y agoBrass eye came true! What is this for? Laser audio mics into the bedrooms of suspected anime forum members?
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoSuitably organised protest folks need to roll out anti facial recognition tools. Maybe even turn facial coverings into a source of revenue. One tool would be methods to blind said facial recognition vans. Cameras are relatively easily "blinded".
- jamescrowley 1y agoAssuming those don’t become illegal - Australian authorities are looking to ban face masks at protests- https://www.hrlc.org.au/explainers/human-rights-briefing-vic-anti-protest-laws/ https://www.hrlc.org.au/explainers/human-rights-briefing-vic...
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoYeah, Australia's conservative side of politics (arguably both sides are conservative in this regard) have, at various times, tried to make protesting itself illegal. I like the irony of it, and doubt that "real" protesters give much of a fuck what kinds of boundaries the protested try to put around protesting. These kinds of things are just another data point documenting "the general decline".
- mr90210 1y agoWhenever a brutal regime rise again, it will thrive due to the amount of work being done on surveillance tech. Can you imagine Adolf (DE), Benito (IT), and Joseph (RU) with access to the same surveillance tech?
- inatreecrown2 1y agoWhy do people need to be surveilled in the first place? Is Britain so full of offenders?
- mhh__ 1y agoNo, but also yes in the sense that we don't even know how many people are in the country and it's much easier to make things worse for everyone else than actually confront what has happened to the nation
- Herring 1y agoColonial/empire mentality. It always comes home to roost, and the people are always surprised when it does.
- rtaylorgarlock 1y agothat's a very political question you pose here
- inatreecrown2 1y agowho cares?
- deadbabe 1y agoI’ve always wanted to visit the UK but it really sounds like a shithole now where you will be treated as guilty just for existing in public and your every move will be monitored at all times.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 1y agoAnd now they have this new visa thing for US visitors, pretty intrusive, won't fill it. I know the US started that sh*t, the world is enshittificating quickly.
- sdotdev 1y agoIts all very dystopian. People say we need to fight back against this but realistically how?
- erickf1 1y agoThe UK is almost lost.
- donatj 1y agoIt's done been lost.
- NoImmatureAdHom 1y agoThey are a failed people.
- octopoc 1y agoThere's a resurgence of patriotism in the political right in Britain from what I hear. They have a few years yet before the next election so we'll see where this goes, but I wouldn't count out the English people yet.
- djohnston 1y agoHonestly I wouldn’t mind it if the police actually did anything. The UK has American style public services with European tax rates. They have Chinese style surveillance and thought control with LATAM levels of criminality. They constantly seem to implement the worst of all possible solutions.
- OhioMan2943 1y agoWho is pushing this within the UK- government aside? I want some avenues of search that help me make sense of where the world is heading. Thanks. Can email my proton proxy in my profile if you want to be discreet. I have a whole life ahead of me and need to know how to prepare.
- ginko 1y agoEven within the government I can’t understand how a democratically elected politician could support something like this.
- zabana 1y agomaybe democracy isn't so great after all ...
- octopoc 1y agoDemocracy is like Communism. Every time you point out a problem with Democracy, someone else can point out how it isn't True Democracy(R). For example, in the West there are massive support for applying pressure to Israel to stop the genocide. But very little actually happens because, at least in my country, Israel has literally bought off the key politicians[1]. This isn't True Democracy(R) because the people's representatives have been paid to represent a foreign nation. [1] https://www.commondreams.org/news/aipac-100-million https://www.commondreams.org/news/aipac-100-million
- hsuduebc2 1y agoI wonder if they left the EU so they could monitor and restrict their citizens even more effectively and quickly. Just like limiting the length of knives this will definitely not solve their crime problem.
- fastball 1y agoThe UK has been a surveillance state for a long time. I've been the victim of property crime 4x in the UK, and 3 of those times the entire thing was caught on multiple CCTVs. But that didn't help me get my stuff back or prosecute criminals. The one time I did get my computer back was when the police raided a stash house (due to an anonymous tip, not surveillance) and found a treasure trove of stolen electronics, which included my computer. But having cameras everywhere in London didn't help at all, so AFAICT they only exist to surveil you.
- Freedom5093 1y agoThis is untrue? Cameras in the UK are not "just used for surveillance". The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders. > The Met reported that in 12 months they made 580 arrests using LFR for offences including, rape, domestic abuse, knife crime, GBH and robbery, including 52 registered sex offenders arrested for breaching their conditions. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/live-facial-recognition-technology-to-catch-high-harm-offenders#:~:text=Live%20Facial%20Recognition%20has%20already,across%20the%20country%20moving%20forward. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/live-facial-recognition-t... That's statistics for London, not the rest of the UK.
- d--b 1y agoIt doesn’t say how many times they handcuffed the wrong guy.
- rkomorn 1y ago> The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders. I'm confused as to how that isn't also "surveillance". Being able to know where someone is on your city sure seems like it fits the bill to me, unless you're considering it "enforcement" (and different from surveillance)?
- teamonkey 1y agoRealistically, CCTV probably will help catching and prosecuting the people who invaded your home. But CCTV doesn’t act as a deterrent like a bobby on the street would. And because there’s a lack of visibility of criminals being caught, it just feels like the police are doing nothing. If they’re caught down the line it’s unlikely you’d hear about it anyway. The police can’t tell you without it being proven in court unless essentially caught red-handed, and even if proven successfully that could be months or even years away. Unfortunately, it’s impractical for them to track down your stolen items without investing much more time than the value of those goods (though I would rather they did that than, say, arrest hundreds of peaceful protestors). This isn’t unique to the UK; my house was raided when I lived in another country and the police attitude was only to record the theft and assume it was gone for good. It really hurts and makes you feel unsafe but I doubt the police force in any major city in any country will spend time looking for stolen goods after a break-in. (I’m not saying that the surveillance aspect isn’t a very real problem.)
- marsven_422 1y ago[dead]
- ksajadi 1y agoThis is the same country that couldn’t introduce driver’s licences with pictures for privacy and surveillance for years. What happened?
- arresin 1y agoIncreased paranoia among the rulers because of their guilty conscience.
- SlowTao 1y agoPretty much. The more they fear the blowback of the actions of civilisation, the more this in power try to hold any semblance of normality in place by force.
- arrowsmith 1y agoDecades of neoliberalism and mass immigration (but I repeat myself) dissolved all the ties — family, community, faith, national identity — that once bound us together. Now there's no social solidarity or cohesion and no-one trusts each other, so they turn to the all-powerful state as the only thing left that can maintain order. Neoliberalism's end game.
- gnubee 1y agoSort of silly to talk about this when everyone is holding a facing-them network camera in front of themselves much of every day.
- arresin 1y agoStraw man.
- moi2388 1y agoPaper straw man*
- gnubee 1y agoBees-wax-coated, non-pfas, organic hay straw man? Security theatre, like TSA shoe policies, inducing the panopticon. Leaked rumors about facial recognition vans serve their purpose, and we post in these comments while literally in front of networked cameras.
- gnubee 1y agoSippy cup, man.
- thrown-0825 1y agoThe UK ran out of colonies to oppress so they turned on their own people.
- immibis 1y agoa.k.a. Foucault's Boomerang. All empires do it eventually.
- Freedom5093 1y agoThis would lead to a rise in doctors and accountants wearing the combo of Canada goose jacket, balaclava and man-sling-bag in summer.
- skeezyboy 1y ago[flagged]
- anentropic 1y agocan someone explain this reference to me please
- buyucu 1y agoEither the England is a shithole overrun with crime, or English elites are paranoid. Locals can tell me which one it is.
- HKH2 1y agoThat could be a false dichotomy.
- SlowTao 1y agoIt has been said that England is a 3rd world country attached to London. That kind of dilemma will come out in odd ways like this.
- scoot 1y agoSaid by someone who hasn't been to the less affluent parts of London, I suspect.
- skeezyboy 1y agoshithole
- uncircle 1y agoEnglish politicians are just a decade ahead than the rest of the Western world. They are not the only ones doing massive surveillance, but they are some of the first to have learned that the masses are completely powerless against the state, so do not even have to hide their intentions any more. What are citizens gonna do? Vote for the other colour that wants the exact same thing? Start a new petition? Go cry to the media that are perpetuating state propaganda? Democracy has completely lost its meaning, and we're ruled by oligarchs and room-temperature IQ career politicians. I'm so glad to have left that silly island after more than a decade there, but sadly where I am now UK is seen as a model to imitate, and likewise in the rest of Europe. Citizens are completely f'd, and they've also been defanged thanks to modern tech and the entertainment business. Apart from the few that take to the streets to protest with little achievement other than a stint in jail, the vast majority are scrolling TikTok and watching US politics drama as if it was reality TV. I'm waiting for bated breath for Reform to be voted in, and be as utterly useless as the other two parties. What a bloody farce.
- KnuthIsGod 1y agoSo when China did this, this was criticised. When the UK do it... Double standards are wonderful.
- globular-toast 1y agoYou're in a comment section full of criticism. When China did it the criticism was irrelevant. The citizens are powerless and don't care. When the UK does it the criticism will also be irrelevant. The citizens are powerless and don't care. I don't see why any contradiction or double standard.
- joenot443 1y agoAll of my acquaintances from the UK have had really critical things to say about their present government and _especially_ about the OSA and surveillance state stuff.
- arrowsmith 1y agoI campaigned in the recent council elections (we lost) and knocked on hundreds of doors in my area, speaking to people of all demographics about politics. I can't exaggerate the collective despair that I witnessed. Young or old, black or white, Labour or Tory, every single person I spoke to without exception had something negative to say about the state of the country. No matter what their politics, no-one was optimistic, and why would they be? In recent weeks we've seeing unprecedented protests against migrant hotels, but opposition to immigration is just part of the picture. Brits are giving up on normal politics in ways I wouldn't have imagined even two years ago. Dark times are ahead.
- aurareturn 1y agoWatch out. Someone on HN might send you a link to "Whataboutism" in order to dodge double standard accusations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism I might as well do it first. For whatever reason, people on HN seem to think double standards are ok as long as the west do it but not when China does it. Maybe because "freedom"?
- skeezyboy 1y agoi mean, they do fuck all anyway so its a moot point
- antonymy 1y agoYou need photo ID to verify your age to access "adult content" (which definition is ever-expanding outside the boundaries of smut) and now police begin using this new pool of facial data to surveil the public en masse. They didn't even wait half a year to show their hand. That's how confident they are.
- Roark66 1y agoThe moment the Brexit referendum results were in I knew exactly where this will lead... I wish I was wrong.
- bayindirh 1y agoWhole world is reeling in the same direction quite briskly, I may say. So, Brexit or not, this would have happened.
- PicassoCTs 1y agoYou can get a feeling of the scope of the crisis to come, on just how much government is ready to clamp down and trying to preserve "civilization" through surveillance. Even if western liberal society vanishing in the process makes that protection measure in relation to the protection goal is dizzying. And encoded in all that ruckus is a uncomfortable truth! This is as far as we will go! There is no miracle tech on the horizon, that can be handed out to the masses, bribing all of us with a 60s like surplus to be peaceful. Instead its panopticon or bust!
- bayindirh 1y agoThis might be a hot take, but watching countries from pointing fingers and lecturing others about democracy to adopting the same tactics and use the cutting edge technology they have rambled about is both interesting and sobering. We're all human, we're all the same.
- ethan_smith 1y agoMobile facial recognition systems suffer from significantly reduced accuracy compared to fixed installations due to variable lighting, angles, vibration, and lower-quality optics - making these vans likely less effective than the existing CCTV network.
- ur-whale 1y agoFrom a lot of different angles, the UK is going full dystopia: privacy, civil rights, economy, demography time to vote with your feet people.
- pcdoodle 1y agoFuck the UK Government. Do something.
- Bender 1y agoWho needs the vans when one has Tesla's roaming the streets and parked in random places? Those things have a myriad of cameras. What stops Telsa from providing access to (insert highest paying agencies and/or companies)? Surely by now some other modern cars have followed this pattern. There's even a camera pointed at the drivers face. It's only a matter of time before they have fast uplinks to Starlink. I have to assume the car could do some local AI to minimize uploading noise and only upload the interesting bits. telsa> give me the location and names of everyone currently picking their nose, lol.
- projectazorian 1y agoThey're already doing this so that the feds can slap terrorism charges on people who vandalize Teslas.
- liampulles 1y agoIs there a public conversation in European countries about the value of liberty? I don't mean arguments about how liberty can lead to more economic prosperity, I mean how liberty is valuable on its own terms. Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move. How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
- Stevvo 1y agoIn the EU we have different liberties to the US. That doesn't necessarily make Europeans less free. For example, wlthe EU has free movement of goods, capital, services, and people across borders. None of which are present in the USA. Does that make Americans less free than Europeans? Some would argue so, but I don't see it. The UK however, maybe. Brexit was a real dumb idea.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoThere is no expectation of privacy in public and there never has been.
- luxuryballs 1y agoFacial recognition vans sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi indie game that’s intentionally trying to be funny/absurd.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- eth0up 1y agoI suppose it beats mobile xray vans. Or, I've always had trouble looking on the bright side. 1. https://www.rapiscan-ase.com/products/mobile/zbv-cargo-and-vehicle-screening https://www.rapiscan-ase.com/products/mobile/zbv-cargo-and-v... 2. https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/technologies/z_backscatter-x-ray https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/technologies/z_backscatte...
- Rakshith 1y agoThe Khans are relentless on making Briton islamic as fast as they possibly can aren't they