Related: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/uk_expands_police_facial_recognition/
Must be a truly dangerous place...
https://web.archive.org/web/20100824175032/http://fitwatch.o...
[0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)
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
The article does not claim this:
"The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.
But the error count is much higher once someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive"
These are 2 different metrics that measure 2 different things and so they are both correct at the same time. But I must say I am not clear what each exactly means.
And yet they are still pushing [0]
[0] https://edri.org/our-work/despite-warning-from-lawyers-eu-go...
Well. Maybe[0].
No, they are not.
> Our research indicates that over 100,000 online services are likely to be in scope of the Online Safety Act – from the largest social media platforms to the smallest community forum. We know that new regulation can create uncertainty – particularly for small organisations that may be run on a part time or voluntary basis.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
Ah right, just a couple of forms how bad can it possi...
> Step 1: identify the 17 kinds of priority illegal content that need to be separately assessed
lol.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funkmesswagen_(Fernmeldewesen)...
(via >>44887373 , but we merged that thread hither)
> Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.
> As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.
> What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
https://live.staticflickr.com/2314/2171185463_92a40441ab_b.j...
The Brits have been going full steam ahead for many decades.
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.
https://news.sky.com/story/prisoners-to-be-released-after-se...
> 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-t...
That's statistics for London, not the rest of the UK.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24076378.just-17-per-cent-....
It would be nice if we removed the security guards for politicans, and if they're not doing bad stuff, they have nothing to fear.
Spraying paint down military jet engines rendering them inoperable until repaired, at a cos of millions of pounds.
> historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objective
The legal definition of terrorism in the UK has for many years (at least all of the current century, I think a lot longer) included "serious damage to property":
https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism
and I think causing many millions of pounds worth of damage is clearly serious.
I do not entirely agree with the definition (I particularly oppose making collecting information and disseminating publications terrorism) but it is what has long been accepted.
The EU courts have sometimes been helpful, but the EU lawmakers have been atleast as bad as the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
As other comments have pointed out the EU has also pushed a lot of other privacy invasive legislation.
Over the last hundred years, violent crime has droped sharply worldwide.
Over the last twenty years, it has fallen alot in developed countries such as Western Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea.
In the United Kingdom, both violent and property crime have gone down in the past two decades. The main exception is fraud, scams and cybercrime, which have increased.
Overall, crime, especially violent crime, is far lower now than it used to be.
So why does it not feel that way? Mostly because we are floded with news about every incident. It sticks in our heads and makes us beleive things are worse than they are. It is like air travel: whenever there is a major crash, the headlines fill up with every minor incident, even though flying has never been safer than it is today.
This is less about criminality and more about control.
There's definitely an argument to be made that things have gotten safer because we have more surveillance, but that argument also has many valid counter-arguments, and giving away your freedom for absolute law and order isn't the way to go in my opinion, especially when you use narratives like "crime in DC is at an all time high" like we've seen in the USA lately which is false. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
A balance of surveillance and freedom is necessary for a healthy society. (By surveillance in this context, I mean simple things like CCTVs, police patrols, not necessarily drag-nets, face rec, whatever mind you).
if you're going to change the central focus of your comment, do it in a reply not an edit
China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online. And apparently Chinese courts even limited facial recognition (no clue how it'll work in practice though). [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-says-facial-recogni...
Here is an article about live/post facial recognition:
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-ai-facial-recognition-tec...
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
How absurd is this statement. China jails and disappears people for online statements at a rate several orders of magnitude larger than any western country.
It's borderline ridiculous to even make a comparison. Some quick examples:
1. https://thediplomat.com/2025/03/chinas-system-of-mass-arbitr...
2. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/china/hong-kong-security-arre...
You can get arrested for "picking quarrels" online:
3. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3146188/pic...
It's conceptually pretty similar to cell tower dumps, where they ask for all data from a cell tower during a particular time frame. This was recently ruled unconstitutional (https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-...), but they used it for like 15 years before that (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/how-cell-tower-d...). I can imagine blanket car footage dumps working for a similar amount of time.
Or, I've always had trouble looking on the bright side.
1. https://www.rapiscan-ase.com/products/mobile/zbv-cargo-and-v...
2. https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/technologies/z_backscatte...
If the government wants to shut this group down (which I think is a reasonable response to an attack on our military) then I'm not sure what other options were available to them. And like I said, what they did seems to meet the legal definition of terrorism (regardless of whether that definition is a good one.)
Of all the arguments we could be having about Palestine, I'm really not going to shed any tears for Palestine Action.
But I'm not here to get lost in the weeds, I just objected to the misleading half-truths that were being presented above. Most people reading this don't follow UK news closely and might come away with the impression that the government is banning pro-Palestine protest entirely, or is making it illegal to merely "hold placards". That's an outrageous distortion, and it hardly helps the pro-Palestine cause. I couldn't let it slide.
The rearmament initiative is particularly concerning. Over the past three years, communities in Italy, Spain, Greece, and Germany have been devastated by flooding, wildfires, etc. Rather than prioritizing investment in resilient infrastructure, leaders are channeling resources into rearmament to confront Russia and China (or so they say - since they are acting as clowns anyway no one really pays attention). My concern is that these weapons may ultimately be used by Europeans against one another; It happened twice already.
[^1]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/temporary-border-controls-to...
[^2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-europe-...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr548zdmz3jo.amp
[2] https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
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"?
Suppose there was an organization that had written by-laws which were not permitted to be changed but which demanded adherence (on pain of death), including never leaving the organization. Also suppose that most of the members of that organization collectively decided not to adhere to all of its rules (some were considered incompatible with "progress")... but some continued to. And others sometimes began to, but only under stress, because the by-laws book (which, again, cannot be changed, on pain of death) made NO clarification on scope of application, and people were free to interpret the by-laws literally.
Why would you not judge that organization, given that its by-laws are its core? Why would you make special exceptions for ANY organization (or its members), here?
I mean, objectively-speaking, if we weren't reflexively defending the org we're of course discussing, it sounds like a dystopian science-fiction novel. (If I'm being honest, it sounds A LOT like Warhammer, actually.)
Here's a fun thing to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(tafsir)
"With few exceptions, Islamic revelations do not state which Quranic verses or hadith have been abrogated, and Muslim exegetes and jurists have disagreed over which and how many hadith and verses of the Quran are recognized as abrogated, with estimates varying from less than ten to over 500."
Also note that naskh tends to recognize later passages as overriding earlier passages. Guess which ones are the more violent ones...
See a problem, yet? Please don't gaslight me into not seeing one.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/14/grooming-gangs...
3.7% of sexual abuse cases involved group based abuse
Asian or British Asian people account for 5% of offenders while making up 9% of the British populatiin
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