6 ms·

I really don't understand why they do trials for this. What would be the failure case for the trial? "We carried out the trial for 6 weeks over X period of time

by Traster 2mo ago

I really don't understand why they do trials for this. What would be the failure case for the trial? "We carried out the trial for 6 weeks over X period of time, we arrested Y people, at that rate we've decided this is not compatible with modern liberal democracy, we would've traded a free society for Y+2 arrests over X period but we just didn't quite get there"? As suggested by other people - this is just going to be used to identify, infiltrate and disrupt the numerous peaceful protests that the police aren't keen on in London.

jambalaya8 2mo ago
All due respect but I am not totally against police dealing with protests. I am against this Orwellian surveillance stuff. If you want to police so people can deal with day to day things like go shopping without being harassed or freaked out I am all for that. But do it the old fashioned way.
- samudrijan 2mo ago
  So flash bang grenades to peaceful protesters skulls is okay? Shooting rubber bullets at peaceful protesters eyes is okay?
  - dghlsakjg 2mo ago
    None of what they said could logically lead to that conclusion.
    - account42 2mo ago
      These are the techniques police have been using to suppress protests without mass surveillance.
      - jambalaya8 2mo ago
        the alternative, of people just not acting that way, seems to have been forgotten about. the truth is most people can easily lookup roughly what percentage of people feel what way online. i don't need or want to have streets i have to walk shut down or taken over by craziness and annoying props and signs. wanna protest? go to where your "elected officials" are. not me.
  - stronglikedan 2mo ago
    As usual, it depends. "Peaceful" is a very subjective term. Like the mostly peaceful but fiery protests in Wisconsin.
    - samudrijan 2mo ago
      OWS https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/26/occupy-oakland-veteran-critical-condition https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/26/occupy-oakland... BLM https://rubberbullets.longlead.com/chapter/minneapolis-police-shooting-journalist-linda-tirado https://rubberbullets.longlead.com/chapter/minneapolis-polic... No Kings https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/15/us/no-kings-protest-usc-student-loses-eye-la https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/15/us/no-kings-protest-usc-stude...
    - account42 2mo ago
      And what it depends on is mainly which side "won" in the end and gets to write the history.
  - jambalaya8 2mo ago
    Let's see. As I, a seemingly private citizen, do not participate in any of these "events", but find they cause my anxiety and PTSD to go completely off the rails when all I want is a low-stress way to deal with my personal needs, not repeated antagonistic interactions when these things go on (and for who knows what reason, I seem to be someone these non-peaceful people like to provoke when it is going on), it seems to my benefit to be not for things that irritate the hell out of me. I can see no case where I personally would feel comfortable with scanning of my face though, if I can help it (yes, I know it goes on). I do not feel safer with mass surveillance.
    - fao_ 2mo ago
      You realise the police response is the reason for the violence? Right? This is an almost guaranteed fact for any protest, going back past the 1970s.
foldr 2mo ago
How would that work? Easiest way to stop protests is to block off the area of the planned protest and arrest people who try to enter it. It’s not clear to me how facial recognition on the tube would help from a practical point or view. Also, this seems to just be a trial expanding existing time and location scoped deployments of live facial recognition into a new environment, rather than a trial run for always-on live facial recognition across the tube network.
- brettermeier 2mo ago
  Facial recognition could be used to identify people who are likely to participate in protests and prevent them from doing so in advance by intercepting them at their boarding station or somewhere near it. You could also scan for persons arriving in a city where a protest might be plannend and arrest them beforehand.
  - foldr 2mo ago
    As with your sibling comment, what you’re describing is theoretically possible, but it’s also more difficult and resource intensive than the simple dumb alternative of blocking off the area of the planned protest and putting some police officers outside nearby tube stations to arrest anyone who’s clearly intending to head to the protest. It’s already easy for the police to prevent protests in a practical sense. It’s a political and legal issue more than a technical one.
    - _heimdall 2mo ago
      What would be grounds for arresting someone at the tube stations? Is it illegal in the UK for police to believe you intend to go a certain area based on how you exit the tube?
      - dofm 2mo ago
        It's not about grounds to arrest them, it's about practicality. If you need to arrest someone in London (someone who might be about to cause harm) then there's a very good chance they will go through a tube station, and they tend to have relatively few, easily controlled exits. Most tube stations have two or less. A few high profile tube stations occasionally have armed police presence. But I think the idea that face recognition is being used to suppress protest is pretty overcooked; apart from the utter silliness around the banning of Palestine Action, we have a solid right to protest and we do. The main problem is London has far too few police officers, and it has a transport system that is under consistent terror threat.
sarjann 2mo ago
If I were to guess, they may have some "test" users (people who are involved in this) who are on the watchlist, they do their regular commutes and see if the system picks them up each time. For this system there is no requirement that criminals faces are used to test it.
fragmede 2mo ago
The failure mode is incorrect detections. If the automated system says person 1 from camera 1 is the same as person 1 in camera 2, and then extrapolate out to 10,000 people and cameras, and then don't get it wrong. Because the BBC is never going to let you live it down if the person they arrested for stealing kinda sorta looks like the guy that actually did the stealing.
- raverbashing 2mo ago
  These are different problems, with different sensitivity/selectivity (and fail modes) It's one thing to identify a person from a database, another from camera 1, then camera 2 etc. My guess is the latter has a much lower false positive rate
- andyjohnson0 2mo ago
  Jean Charles de Menezes never got as far as being arrested. The police observed him enter an Underground station, followed him onto a tube train, and put seven bullets into his head. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Men...
  - mattlondon 2mo ago
    Perhaps facial recognition would have saved him? It's not like humans are 100% accurate as this demonstrates
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - andyjohnson0 2mo ago
      Or perhaps facial recognition would leave even less time for decision making. Someone who's face resembles that of a known terrorist was detected entering the station 8 seconds ago. He's carrying a backpack and will be on a crowded platform in 37 seconds time. There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now...
steve_gh 2mo ago
It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things. If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc. Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images. The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.
- ExoticPearTree 2mo ago
  The UK stopped being a democracy a long time ago. In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination. It is also the place where you can be jailed for not providing the PIN to your phone. I could go on.
  - _fw 2mo ago
    You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence. The only realistic protection here is a “decoy” partition, a partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS. That gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.
    - dofm 2mo ago
      > You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence. Again, no, not just "in an investigation". It has to be an investigation that has reached the point where they have gone to a judge and got permission to serve written notice. The judge will ask them if there is a necessary and proportionate reason. There is then a timeframe in which you have to respond. Police can't simply demand your PIN and charge you if you don't comply.
gspr 2mo ago
Just a guess, but I would think that a significant motivation for doing a trial is to ensure that the frog is boiled slowly. Opposition can now be met with "it's just a trial, relax". Then you expand the trial a bit. Keep running it until the discourse moves on. And then a few years down the line, when you roll out the full system and people complain, you can counter with "these people are exaggerating their concerns, we've trialled this for yeaaars and there were very few problems!"
- _fw 2mo ago
  There’s also transparency theatre here. “If it WAS part of a nefarious system, surely we wouldn’t be talking about it so openly?” It’s especially disappointing when the entire system is foiled by the balaclavas worn by so many of the country’s criminals every day anyway.
  - angry_octet 2mo ago
    The obvious next step is to prevent entry if the face is covered. I'm curious to know how resistant the system is to face masks with a printed picture on the front (or indeed, the back).
CommanderData 2mo ago
They are prepared to arrest 90 year old protestors at Palestinian matches for Israel, they won't stop until all critism of that illegal state is silenced.
ChrisRR 2mo ago
Because I guess if it's not proven to be effective if they use some known test cases, then they won't roll out to the whole network
kotaKat 2mo ago
Is it to ID protestors, or to ID overstayers/other immigrant offenses? Home Office just parked up outside the station waiting for every overstayer to flag instead of just questioning people on walkups?
- chrisjj 2mo ago
  Or fare dodgers. Of which there are many thanks to the chocolate teapot of ticket security e.g. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/tfl-fare-dodger-caught-using-083600067.html https://uk.news.yahoo.com/tfl-fare-dodger-caught-using-08360...
ra 2mo ago
I don't think it's very scientific, more of a procurement process.
- hudmal 2mo ago
  100%
chrisjj 2mo ago
> What would be the failure case for the trial? Every passenger taking the "nope" lane.
tarxvf 2mo ago
It's to get people used to the idea without giving enough surface area to fight it socially. Same thing happened with the body scanners at airports in the US, now with facial recognition at airports, and a number of other privacy concerns. It's a well-worn and proven playbook. At first it's a trial, experimental. Then it's standard, but optional and with incentives to do it. Then it's standard but you can opt out and there's lots of signs to tell you how. Slowly they make it more uncomfortable to opt out, and the signs disappear, and they berate you for trying it. Eventually it is no longer legal to opt out. Any one step is hard to fight back against without looking like a loon to people who don't care about this kind of thing, and over the course of a few years you can take people gently through a process that, had it happened suddenly, would never have succeeded due to pushback.
- account42 2mo ago
  Yes, the good old boiling the frog tactic.

by Traster 2mo ago

jambalaya8 2mo ago

All due respect but I am not totally against police dealing with protests. I am against this Orwellian surveillance stuff. If you want to police so people can deal with day to day things like go shopping without being harassed or freaked out I am all for that. But do it the old fashioned way.

samudrijan 2mo ago
So flash bang grenades to peaceful protesters skulls is okay? Shooting rubber bullets at peaceful protesters eyes is okay?
- dghlsakjg 2mo ago
  None of what they said could logically lead to that conclusion.
  - account42 2mo ago
    These are the techniques police have been using to suppress protests without mass surveillance.
    - jambalaya8 2mo ago
      the alternative, of people just not acting that way, seems to have been forgotten about. the truth is most people can easily lookup roughly what percentage of people feel what way online. i don't need or want to have streets i have to walk shut down or taken over by craziness and annoying props and signs. wanna protest? go to where your "elected officials" are. not me.
- stronglikedan 2mo ago
  As usual, it depends. "Peaceful" is a very subjective term. Like the mostly peaceful but fiery protests in Wisconsin.
  - samudrijan 2mo ago
    OWS https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/26/occupy-oakland-veteran-critical-condition https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/26/occupy-oakland... BLM https://rubberbullets.longlead.com/chapter/minneapolis-police-shooting-journalist-linda-tirado https://rubberbullets.longlead.com/chapter/minneapolis-polic... No Kings https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/15/us/no-kings-protest-usc-student-loses-eye-la https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/15/us/no-kings-protest-usc-stude...
  - account42 2mo ago
    And what it depends on is mainly which side "won" in the end and gets to write the history.
- jambalaya8 2mo ago
  Let's see. As I, a seemingly private citizen, do not participate in any of these "events", but find they cause my anxiety and PTSD to go completely off the rails when all I want is a low-stress way to deal with my personal needs, not repeated antagonistic interactions when these things go on (and for who knows what reason, I seem to be someone these non-peaceful people like to provoke when it is going on), it seems to my benefit to be not for things that irritate the hell out of me. I can see no case where I personally would feel comfortable with scanning of my face though, if I can help it (yes, I know it goes on). I do not feel safer with mass surveillance.
  - fao_ 2mo ago
    You realise the police response is the reason for the violence? Right? This is an almost guaranteed fact for any protest, going back past the 1970s.

foldr 2mo ago

How would that work? Easiest way to stop protests is to block off the area of the planned protest and arrest people who try to enter it. It’s not clear to me how facial recognition on the tube would help from a practical point or view. Also, this seems to just be a trial expanding existing time and location scoped deployments of live facial recognition into a new environment, rather than a trial run for always-on live facial recognition across the tube network.

brettermeier 2mo ago
Facial recognition could be used to identify people who are likely to participate in protests and prevent them from doing so in advance by intercepting them at their boarding station or somewhere near it. You could also scan for persons arriving in a city where a protest might be plannend and arrest them beforehand.
- foldr 2mo ago
  As with your sibling comment, what you’re describing is theoretically possible, but it’s also more difficult and resource intensive than the simple dumb alternative of blocking off the area of the planned protest and putting some police officers outside nearby tube stations to arrest anyone who’s clearly intending to head to the protest. It’s already easy for the police to prevent protests in a practical sense. It’s a political and legal issue more than a technical one.
  - _heimdall 2mo ago
    What would be grounds for arresting someone at the tube stations? Is it illegal in the UK for police to believe you intend to go a certain area based on how you exit the tube?
    - dofm 2mo ago
      It's not about grounds to arrest them, it's about practicality. If you need to arrest someone in London (someone who might be about to cause harm) then there's a very good chance they will go through a tube station, and they tend to have relatively few, easily controlled exits. Most tube stations have two or less. A few high profile tube stations occasionally have armed police presence. But I think the idea that face recognition is being used to suppress protest is pretty overcooked; apart from the utter silliness around the banning of Palestine Action, we have a solid right to protest and we do. The main problem is London has far too few police officers, and it has a transport system that is under consistent terror threat.

sarjann 2mo ago

If I were to guess, they may have some "test" users (people who are involved in this) who are on the watchlist, they do their regular commutes and see if the system picks them up each time. For this system there is no requirement that criminals faces are used to test it.

fragmede 2mo ago

The failure mode is incorrect detections. If the automated system says person 1 from camera 1 is the same as person 1 in camera 2, and then extrapolate out to 10,000 people and cameras, and then don't get it wrong. Because the BBC is never going to let you live it down if the person they arrested for stealing kinda sorta looks like the guy that actually did the stealing.

raverbashing 2mo ago
These are different problems, with different sensitivity/selectivity (and fail modes) It's one thing to identify a person from a database, another from camera 1, then camera 2 etc. My guess is the latter has a much lower false positive rate
andyjohnson0 2mo ago
Jean Charles de Menezes never got as far as being arrested. The police observed him enter an Underground station, followed him onto a tube train, and put seven bullets into his head. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Men...
- mattlondon 2mo ago
  Perhaps facial recognition would have saved him? It's not like humans are 100% accurate as this demonstrates
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - andyjohnson0 2mo ago
    Or perhaps facial recognition would leave even less time for decision making. Someone who's face resembles that of a known terrorist was detected entering the station 8 seconds ago. He's carrying a backpack and will be on a crowded platform in 37 seconds time. There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now...

steve_gh 2mo ago

It's a technology. What you could do with it, and what you should do with it are completely different things. If you follow the links there is a lot of information about the trial, including a whole series of documents identifying the legal framework that authorises LFR, including rationale under GDPR, Data Protection etc. Of course, this technology could be used for bad purposes. But within a democracy, policing happens with the consent of the people, expressed through various channels including legal (parliament and local government) and police commissioners. What is interesting is the way that these frameworks are used to constrain the purpose and extent of this processing. For example, at the moment the images on the watchlist can only be drawn from custody images. The police already have powers to seize CCTV and door-cam imagery in order to investigate crime. They need a warrant from a judge - so it isn't justified without good reason such as serious crimes. This is the way you constrain these things - you put the regulatory framework around them. You can't put the technology back in the box, so you put rules and expectations around how it is used.

ExoticPearTree 2mo ago
The UK stopped being a democracy a long time ago. In the UK if you keep your mouth shut during an investigation, it may harm your defense. There is zero right against self-incrimination. It is also the place where you can be jailed for not providing the PIN to your phone. I could go on.
- _fw 2mo ago
  You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence. The only realistic protection here is a “decoy” partition, a partition that provides access to a separate installation of the OS. That gives the device owner plausible deniability that their real system even exists.
  - dofm 2mo ago
    > You WILL be charged for not giving the PIN to your phone in an investigation. It’s a strict liability offence which means there’s no legal defence. Again, no, not just "in an investigation". It has to be an investigation that has reached the point where they have gone to a judge and got permission to serve written notice. The judge will ask them if there is a necessary and proportionate reason. There is then a timeframe in which you have to respond. Police can't simply demand your PIN and charge you if you don't comply.

gspr 2mo ago

Just a guess, but I would think that a significant motivation for doing a trial is to ensure that the frog is boiled slowly. Opposition can now be met with "it's just a trial, relax". Then you expand the trial a bit. Keep running it until the discourse moves on. And then a few years down the line, when you roll out the full system and people complain, you can counter with "these people are exaggerating their concerns, we've trialled this for yeaaars and there were very few problems!"

_fw 2mo ago
There’s also transparency theatre here. “If it WAS part of a nefarious system, surely we wouldn’t be talking about it so openly?” It’s especially disappointing when the entire system is foiled by the balaclavas worn by so many of the country’s criminals every day anyway.
- angry_octet 2mo ago
  The obvious next step is to prevent entry if the face is covered. I'm curious to know how resistant the system is to face masks with a printed picture on the front (or indeed, the back).

CommanderData 2mo ago

They are prepared to arrest 90 year old protestors at Palestinian matches for Israel, they won't stop until all critism of that illegal state is silenced.

ChrisRR 2mo ago

Because I guess if it's not proven to be effective if they use some known test cases, then they won't roll out to the whole network

kotaKat 2mo ago

Is it to ID protestors, or to ID overstayers/other immigrant offenses? Home Office just parked up outside the station waiting for every overstayer to flag instead of just questioning people on walkups?

chrisjj 2mo ago
Or fare dodgers. Of which there are many thanks to the chocolate teapot of ticket security e.g. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/tfl-fare-dodger-caught-using-083600067.html https://uk.news.yahoo.com/tfl-fare-dodger-caught-using-08360...

ra 2mo ago

I don't think it's very scientific, more of a procurement process.

hudmal 2mo ago
100%

chrisjj 2mo ago

> What would be the failure case for the trial? Every passenger taking the "nope" lane.

tarxvf 2mo ago

It's to get people used to the idea without giving enough surface area to fight it socially. Same thing happened with the body scanners at airports in the US, now with facial recognition at airports, and a number of other privacy concerns. It's a well-worn and proven playbook. At first it's a trial, experimental. Then it's standard, but optional and with incentives to do it. Then it's standard but you can opt out and there's lots of signs to tell you how. Slowly they make it more uncomfortable to opt out, and the signs disappear, and they berate you for trying it. Eventually it is no longer legal to opt out. Any one step is hard to fight back against without looking like a loon to people who don't care about this kind of thing, and over the course of a few years you can take people gently through a process that, had it happened suddenly, would never have succeeded due to pushback.

account42 2mo ago
Yes, the good old boiling the frog tactic.