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It’s a moot point. I’m saddened at the invasion of privacy and the intrusion on an individual’s civil liberties, but anonymous travel on the London Underground died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers.

I’m not saying that “this doesn’t matter because it’s slightly worse than before”. I’m saying the frog has been boiling for a long time.

I don’t want people being surprised as though THIS is the nail in the coffin of untracked movement across the city. As others have said, we’ve always been tracked. This is just them being open about their latest methods.

I hope this serves as a warning for citizens elsewhere: this is a slope that governments will only slide down further. There is no coming back from this in the UK.

Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.

Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country.

Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.

Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years.

Any weapons can and will be utilised against a perceived enemy. When that perceived enemy becomes /you/, you should expect these things to be used against you.

History has taught us that before.

We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.

To add: same happened in russia around 2018 on a couple of subway stations in St.-Pete and in moscow at first

the result? faster tracking and arrests of people for checks who were deemed too problematic + (i.e. with anti-war protests in 2022) the cameras were used to track or threat tracking almost everyone who protested, and lowering the load on the police by coming to the dwellings afterwards in the next several days or even weeks without the need to do it there and then

in 2018-2021 it was still possible to overwhelm the holding capacity of jails in major cities, but after mass tracking it more or less became obsolete

Yes but also no.

On the one hand, yes: the UK is demonstrably "this is fine" when it comes to mass surveillance.

On the other: the government is almost pathologically bad at joined-up thinking.

To illustrate the latter: I have been sent exactly one speeding ticket. It was for a car I had sold 6 months previous to the offence. The police force was somehow unaware of this.

> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state.

Kinda, it's domain-name level, which is again an illustration of the lack of understanding the government has; they were even told this during the public comment phase of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, how their own example of "perhaps a teen goes missing and we can see they went on twitter and look on their account" has the reality of "no you idiots [I'm paraphrasing], their phone is constantly talking to twitter regardless of if they're using it or not, or even still alive or not".

On the other hand, those records are worse than being shared with the state, they can be read at any time by a long list of state entities without anyone even needing a warrant. The Welsh Ambulance service being able to do this without needing warrant is one of the big parts of why I left the UK (the other being Brexit, of course).

> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.

Just want to add, the overhead cameras at checkout are pointed straight down and can read your phone password as you put it in to pull up Apple Pay.

Reminds me of a story I read long ago. (And Snowden's point that even if the current government uses such powers responsibly, a future government may not be so kind...)

---

R.E: What about those who decided they didn't want to go along?

D.L.D: Somewhere in there it was that… because this is a "New Authority" and it represents a change, then, from where your allegiance was presumed to be, people would be called on to publicly acknowledge their allegiance to the new authority. This would mean to sign an agreement or in some public way acknowledge that you accepted this... authority. You accepted its legitimacy and there were two impressions I carried away. If you didn't... and I'm not sure whether the two impressions are necessarily mutually exclusive because this wasn't explored in great detail... one of them was that you would simply have nowhere to go.

If you don't sign up then you can't get any electric impulses in your banking account and you won't have any electric impulses with which to pay your electric, or your mortgage or your food, and when your electric impulses are gone, then you have no means of livelihood.

R.E: Could you get these things from other people, or would that be... in other words, let's say if you had a sympathetic family...

D.L.D: No you could not because the housing authority would keep close tabs on who is inhabiting any domicile. So the housing authority would be sure that everybody living there was authorized to live there.

R.E: Could I get some food?

D.L.D: Your expenditures, through electronic surveillance would be pretty tightly watched so if you were spending too much money at the super market, somebody would pick this up and say,

"How come? What are you doing with all that food? You don't look that fat. You don't have that many people. We know you're not entertaining. What are you doing with all that food?"

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopo...

Oyster is still anonymous, in the sense that no details are required to buy a card, and it can be topped up using cash. The cards can be returned or disposed of as necessary. But as you say, it knows your movements at least in so far as your entry and exit point in the system, with a timestamp, though you can use a separate card for each if you don't mind paying the full fare that gets charged when a journey is 'incomplete'. The barriers also still currently accept paper tickets, but for how long will be anyone's guess. I would assume that as Travelcards can be tied to paper National Rail tickets, it will still be some time until that goes away. I see a lot more people using eTickets these days, and trains even have adverts now reminding people to keep their phones charged to be able to show their ticket to inspectors.

I truly detest the self-checkout cameras. When first introduced it felt like such a blatant intrusion, and the way they have a screen to show you what is being captured is an extra humiliation. Nobody asked them to install self-checkout machines, and yet now we seem to be treated as suspect just for using them.

As for your overall point, yes we are utterly over-surveilled, and have been for decades. It will only get worse, in spite of the fact that there is no clear proof it has made Britain any safer. Most people seem oblivious to it. But then again, they have been finessed into carrying a tracking device with them at every waking moment of their day with little care for the implications, all in the name of safety and convenience, so why would it be any surprise. The default stance for most of the public seems to be 'I don't do anything wrong so why would I mind being watched'.

And the thing that absolutely fucks me off about all of this, is that we don't even get a lawful society in exchange for all of this. On one hand, there's no privacy anywhere. On the other - have your car stolen or a bike? House broken into? Phone snatched out of your hands? Good luck getting anyone to care about this in the slightest. You'd think with all the surveillance tech we'd be living in a nightmare panopticon, but at least petty crime should be eliminated, but nope, sometimes I wonder what's the point of being a law abiding citizen if just stealing has zero consequences and just seems not prosecuted at all.

Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.

And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????

There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.

> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout.

Though this is true, many supermarkets use this as a scare tactic instead of surveillance. I know a few people who work in supermarkets and when when incidents happen they can't use footage from the self-checkouts because they're not recording.

I do wonder if the cameras exist in the machines so one day they can be recording and performing face recognition however.

You're accepting and normalizing deviancy through learned helplessness rather than rebelling and protesting it.
>We have seen in the last 10 years that liberal democracies are fragile things. Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society.

There's been badly thought out legislation, but drawing the conclusion that

"Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society."

Is wrong.

Historically when it comes to sh*tty regimes there is no such thing as "robust restrictions". At best whatever exists before is a minor inconvenience that can be worked around by ignoring, packing the judiciary, intimidation, or changing the law.

At worst the "robust restrictions" hobble the ability of previous reasonable regimes to operate effectively, thereby increasing their chances of being accused of being soft on crime/immigration and ending up with sh*tty regimes led by so called "strongmen".

Ultimately, no amount of rights or technical restrictions is protection from overreach. The only protection is far harder, and it is to work at developing political systems that bring people together and avoid giving the extremists the opportunity to take power in the first place.

(edited to fix italics)

To provide clarity, this isn't (yet) (publicly) hooked up to the whole CCTV network of London Underground stations. Instead they use these temporary portable stations you can see at the end of the linked article.

I went to Victoria station where they were doing this yesterday and the police seemed quite unhappy with me taking photos of them operating the facial recognition station and confronted me almost immediately. The irony...

The area they were doing it in was completely swarming with far more police officers than usual, supposedly to "provide information".

I had expected to see signs all around the station warning passengers that this trial was taking place, but the only ones I saw were directly in that area or by the stairs as you're walking down into it. They weren't small enough that I could characterise them as intentionally hard-to-miss, but I reckon with the amount of traffic going down that staircase, the overwhelming majority of people would not have actually been aware that they were being subject to this LFR trial. I didn't see a single person other than myself pausing to read the signs.

Edit: There also wasn't a single sign inside the gateline where you'd tap out and walk into the area that the camera station was pointing at. I asked the police why this was, and they claimed it was because the cameras are only positioned to capture people entering the station, not exiting. Maybe that's true, as long as you don't turn around at any point? I'm not convinced.

Britain is the original Orwellian society!!

They even practice DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink in Blighty, especially in government and parliamentary circles.

For what it's worth, as a Brit, I assure you no one cares about this, and it's likely that most people, if asked, would support it.

The UK doesn't value liberty for liberty's sake like the US does. In the US there seems to be this notion that freedom is a universal good, where as in the UK people are quite comfortable with liberties being revoked if it means they feel safer or fewer people are doing things they don't like.

UK political debate today largely just consists of debates about what to ban next – loud fireworks, energy drinks, smoking, gambling, porn, not wearing headphones on public transport, praying for people having abortions, etc.

While this tech will obviously be used to clamp down on protests that are inconvenient to the government (as we've seen happen with protests in recent UK history), even these measures tend to be popular in the UK. Most protest groups are net-unpopular, therefore any movement the government makes to crack down on say Palestine protests, climate protests or immigration protests, are fairly popular here.

Imo the UK was accidentally a liberal country post-WWII to the early 1990s because of influence from the US, but culturally the UK isn't liberal and never was. We're a very socially conservative country and take a natural dislike to anyone who rocks the boat a little.

These new digital surveillance techniques are very much in line with British cultural conservatism, and follow a long history of UK mass surveillance.

As a Brit who inhabits the US desire for freedom I genuinely struggle to relate to Brits and it always makes me feel less insane when I come on here and find other people who value liberty too. But in my real life, I think I've genuinely only ever met one Brit who has shared my desire for freedom.

The surveillance of China without the prosperity or safety. At least in China I can leave my bag or laptop out of sight for a moment, same cannot be said of my home city of London. What good is all of this when hard criminals are let out of prison after 6 months. Clown country.
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.

The hubris for surveillance in UK is staggering, what will they do next - roll out the social score system so you'll be banned from taking the tube if you express too much non sanctioned thoughts online?
The issue with all this surveillance is that it always ends up with suppression of dissent and silencing of opposition by abusing enforcement agencies.

All such surveillance should start with 24-hour live video feed of private lives of all politicians... they carry immense power and control, and thus, warrant an equally powerful monitoring and scrutiny compared to common people.

I noticed that in my country delivery couriers on e-bikes sometimes cover their face completely, with a balaclava and a ski mask. They ride at high speeds around pedestrians, break all traffic rules and obviously they prefer to opt out from facial recognition.

Maybe we should start wearing masks in public too. There is no upsides in going around with an open face.

Putting aside the social and legal implications of this trial, I find it very interesting how projects like this are often trumpeted to be successful and celebrated at launch (rather than when proven to work, or save costs or whatever) as though the hard bit was actually wading for months or years through several government and private IT bureaucracies, not making a system that delivers what it promises.
21st century authoritarianism. Humans learned nothing from the 20th century.
Not surprised by this move, the UK is preparing to silence dissent, for a very simple reason: tough times ahead. Guardian reported yesterday the UK might face food shortages, their young are increasingly burdened with supporting the triple lock through their taxes, and people are making exit plans rathert than be milked for their hard work.
Like 10 years ago I realized that facial recognition research was basically on the same level as weapons research, if not worse. So many nefarious usages.

Every researcher and product designer who leaned into this just has helped speedrun the world into a nasty place. But I guess I don’t have to type my passcode into my phone anymore!

The UK already has so much CCTV. Some believe it reduces drug-related, vehicle, and property crime, but most agree is has virtually no effect on violent crime (https://www.college.police.uk/research/crime-reduction-toolk...).

Even if this initiative is effective at reducing crime, I don't want to lose privacy or see a chilling effect in society where people are afraid because they know they're being watched.

“Our deployments are intelligence-led and focused on identifying people wanted by the police or courts, including those suspected of serious offences and those who may be breaching bail conditions or court orders”

This is crazy. Could easily be used to track protesters who went to the an event the police didn’t like.

Just gonna drop this here for no particular reason

https://urban-privacy.com/pages/anti-surveillance-clothing

Brazil was so right. We're just an inference away from being jailed. I'm not from UK but it shows how we are all helpless and see in plain conciousness what is coming. When did we lost the grip?
Technology that began in the private sector, retailers using facial recognition technology to profile customers, has now bled over violently into public life. I strongly believe in the right to be forgotten, and I strongly believe in the right to be peacefully invisible. No flock cameras. No facial recognition cameras. The intrusion and dangers are too great against any benefit.

It's only a matter of time until government forces a social credit score upon all of us back by these cameras.

They weren't? That's more surprising given the UK surveillance state.
Why is Britain police and government seemingly sp eager to build a panopticon? I get it’s the trend worldwide but I’ve always had the impression Britain goes the extra mile and is well above the general level of surveillance typically found in western societies.

I remember about 20 years ago when I lived in London, you had to provide ID to enter clubs. Ok, to check your age. But the bouncers would also scan your id into machines at the entrance that recorded you were there “for your security, and if you don’t want you don’t get in”. Why? See also the vast number of CCTV cameras all over London, more than most capitals in western societies have.

And I suspect it started way before that, see Orwell 1984 for instance.

Where is this obsession coming from??

Lest they commit the offense of buying a baseball bat or being stabbed?
Good. It’s high time we used modern technology to make public transportation safer. Soon there’ll be nowhere left to harass strangers in public. If that’s too Orwellian for you, feel free to bike.
> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available and images of anyone not on the authorised database will be deleted immediately and permanently.

So, massive invasion of privacy, but will only catch stupid criminals (and unsuspecting people who happen to have a strong resemblance with a criminal in the database?).

I've often wondered what would happen if you took some near IR, eye safe, ultra bright LEDs and strobed them at 60 Hz from your headgear in an omnidirectional fashion, pointing away from your body and avoiding nearby floor reflections. You'd stick out like a sore thumb (which I wouldn't mind, as I'm not a criminal nor doing anything wrong!) but it would be enough to likely "opt out" of facial recognition via dint of blinding the camera in the vicinity of your face.

Britain has all sorts of laws like "attempting to pervert the course of justice", so you'd have to be very careful to not accidentally cover for a "real criminal", but just to preserve privacy it might work (especially if more than one person did so).

I've never had the guts to do it, but I do really hate facial recognition and all of this surveillance capitalism.

> People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available

Looking forward to seeing the singnage there.

Sadly, it seems to me that what we are witnessing in our era is a convergence of technology-enhanced surveillance governance globally, greatly eroding personal agency and democratic capacity to institute change.

We desperately need utopian futures but seem to be getting only dystopias regardless of origin state and nominal political ideology: almost as if 1984, Animal Farm, Enemy of the State, Gattaca, Terminator, and THX 1138 had a Waterworld-Mad Max setting.

We should each try to imagine a technology-enabled future utopia and build an enabling technology instead of contributing to this sort of thing - which already exists in most countries not to mention financial surveillance, internet surveillance, mobile phone surveillance, vehicle and commercial flight/ship surveillance.

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Juden einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

Good news! That means they're going to solve all that street crime, right?
can't wait for these to normalize https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cyberpunk+oni+mask&iar=images
This did not end well for freedom in Russia (see Moscow underground face recognition tech targeting dissidents). This will not end well for democracy in Europe.
I have it on good authority they have been doing this for years, maybe this is just an increase to inside the station or maybe just a good time to normalise this…
I don't see how this is any different from how traffic cameras are used. Hot take, but as long as the systems aren't abused by law enforcement I don't see the big deal.
police have been running facial recognition at london protests for years already. so is this just making it official?
And this is how new makeup trends will get started to fool the facial recognition
Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?

Comments here seem like an ideological kneejerk response.

It is BTP, not London Underground, they are not the same thing.
To be honest I don't see the point. Anyone committing a crime goes around in a balaclava these days so facial recognition won't be much use. They'd have much more success just banning face coverings and there would be plenty of support for it.

The problems we have are much deeper though. Petty crime is out of control and it's impacting society in obvious ways. Just go to a shop to see the measures they have to take to try to reduce theft. We don't have enough police due to a decade or two of underfunding. And even if we did we don't have enough prison space to even let harder criminals finish out their sentences - so what's the point in arresting petty criminals?

Saying that London is still one of the safest major cities in the world. Safer than any major US city. I've been living here a long time and the worst I've seen is a few phone thefts. I can walk pretty much anywhere safely at any time of the day or night. Don't let the fear mongering online fool you.

I’ve used the London underground. I wouldn’t let my kids go on it alone. I welcome this tbh. I don’t see what else they’re supposed to do other than have permanent guards on every wagon and every corner 24/7
It's the usual responses isn't it: _'I'm saddened'_ or, _'what has happened to Britain'_. Had a look at America, Russia, or Belarus, etc.?

Living in the UK is fantastic.

How will this handle face masks? Hijabs or Niqabs?
Unsafe UK https://rapeganginquiry.co.uk