9 ms·

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

by _fw 1mo ago

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.

ceuk 1mo ago
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state. How so? I'm with AAISP and I'd be very surprised if they were doing this. What are you referring to here?
- inigyou 1mo ago
  Good choice, but most other people are using capitalismslop ISPs that maximize value extraction. I hear prices are a bit higher at A&A.
  - ceuk 1mo ago
    Yeah bit dearer but it's only ~£55 a month and feels like money well spent. They're an awesome company
dofm 1mo ago
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state. Citation please. "Proactively" is just untrue.
- _fw 1mo ago
  There’s a specific GDPR carve out as outlined by the ICO here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/data-sharing/sharing-personal-data-with-law-enforcement-authorities/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re... I don’t have evidence that shows specific examples of where it happens, but the state apparatus for it to do so exists. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that it is happening on a daily basis.
  - dofm 1mo ago
    That does not at all suggest that UK ISPs proactively share anything with the state. What it means is the GDPR doesn't stop ISPs choosing to share when asked, rather than waiting for the warranted request that will come, as long as there is a lawful basis. Again: I don't really have a problem with that. If you've ever used a website that arranges work for lone workers (freelancers who do site visits, freelance estate agents, models, dog walkers) then you'll presumably want the people who run those communities to feel able to choose to share with law enforcement when asked.
    - constantius 1mo ago
      I think your understanding of 'proactively' might just be different from parent's (and mine). I'd agree that entities that provide their users' data upon a simple request, and a carveout in regulations that allows (not forces) them to do so, fits the definition of proactive.
      - dofm 1mo ago
        Let's not get all Humpty Dumpty here. "Upon request" is reactive by definition. "Proactive" sharing would quite literally mean sharing on one's own initiative.
windowliker 1mo ago
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'.
- bobthepanda 1mo ago
  you don't even need all of that to track people. there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-reveals-which-celebs-dont-tip-and-who-frequents-strip-clubs https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...
  - windowliker 1mo ago
Citizen_Lame 1mo ago
And yet, crime is doing fine. This tells you what the surveillance state is really for.
gambiting 1mo ago
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.
- nervai 1mo ago
  Well, this about protecting the state from people that threaten it or its policies. I don't think it ever was about making us live in a safer city. Snatched your phone? Sorry mate. But some old lady better not be walking around with a tshirt that says "I support Palestine Action".
  - xp84 1mo ago
    It's strange to me that in your bubble you think the police in the UK are mainly there to hassle the "Palestine" protestors and interrupt their peaceful "From the river to the sea" chants. I would say it's a lot more serious that they did nothing to stop the organized Pakistani child-rape gangs, out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it. Either way I can agree with you that it doesn't seem like the police in the UK are using their great power to do much good.
d--b 1mo ago
Also I think that this is just adding face recognition on a already camera-ladden system.
- hammock 1mo ago
  “Just” is doing a lot of work there
andai 1mo ago
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_sociopol_nwo74.htm https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopo...
- inigyou 1mo ago
  This describes Germany.
- philipallstar 1mo ago
  "Why don't you have pronouns in your bio?" - 2022
hammock 1mo ago
> 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.
- juiceland 1mo ago
  I wish that Apple would make a way to require both FaceID and a passcode. This seems like an easy option to add.
  - Cider9986 1mo ago
    GrapheneOS has Touch ID and a passcode as an option.
    - hdgvhicv 1mo ago
      And what happens when your Touch ID stops working I find biometrics to be quite fragile.
      - gardnr 1mo ago
        Wash your hands? /s
      - evilos 1mo ago
        You still have a separate password that authenticates you without biometrics. The touch + passcode is nice because even if someone watches you enter your passcode it won't matter unless they can spoof the fingerprint reader too, which is highly unlikely. And you can use a much shorter passcode for convenience.
  - euroderf 1mo ago
    Something you have + Something you know. SOP.
- nly 1mo ago
  Don't 99% of people just use face or fingerprint unlocking?
burnt-resistor 1mo ago
You're accepting and normalizing deviancy through learned helplessness rather than rebelling and protesting it.
blini-kot 1mo ago
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
- crimsoneer 1mo ago
  It's worth pointing out this is specifically not mass tracking. LFR scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.
  - lazide 1mo ago
    So they say, but how could you even verify it if true? History is replete with ‘oops, I guess we left that switch on after all!’ type situations, and this is perfect for it.
  - mananaysiempre 1mo ago
    To continue GP’s point, in Moscow a “database of outstanding wanted suspects” was enough to get a well-known science writer[1] who publicly expressed her opposition to the war systematically harrassed by the police because she (a then-pregnant woman) matched a database record for, I kid you not, a draft evader. Reportedly some of the officers even admitted the absurdity[2] of the situation but, well, computer says detain. [1] Asya Kazantseva [2] Women can be subject to the draft if they’re doctors, radio engineers, or one of a handful of other professions, but thus far it’s very uncommon and either way not applicable in her case.
  - filcuk 1mo ago
    This is fair, but it feels like it pushes another finger into the door of mass surveillance. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a few toggles away in the station software.
agumonkey 1mo ago
Are police forces faster to solve or avoid crimes due to surveillance at least ?
- batrat 1mo ago
  I wrote in another comment but basically yes. Also they can focus on other cases that require physical presence. No need to patrol the entire subway, put 100 police officers to just patrol, every station when you can have 2-3 guys watch the cameras and just 2-3 patrols ready for intervention.
  - jimnotgym 1mo ago
    Faster to solve, but by not patrolling haven't they given up on detterence?
    - monooso 1mo ago
      Surely the deterrent is the possibility of being caught? If you're more likely to be caught due to the surveillance, logic would dictate that it's the greater deterrent.
      - jimnotgym 1mo ago
        My brother had his window smashed and bag stolen under a cctv camera in London. The police never even investigated. I would hazard to say that wouldn't have happened had a police officer been stood there instead. Some major shops in the UK have photographs of police officers on the door, because it reduces theft!
        psd1 1mo ago
        I think this says more about dwindling police budgets than about the efficacy of surveillance or bobbies on the beat.
        Gigachad 1mo ago
hengistbury 1mo ago
> 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.
ChocolateGod 1mo ago
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state. Your ISP doesn't even know your web history outside of the domain name if they use SNI sniffing for content blocking. > Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country. I don't see the problem on this one. Roads are owned by the government.
- jjav 1mo ago
  > Roads are owned by the government. Roads are owned by the people. The government (should) be the servants of the interests of the people.
  - red_admiral 1mo ago
    They are owned by the Crown, I think. That doesn't contradict your point.
  - munksbeer 1mo ago
    Exactly. Exasperating how many people are not only oblivious to this, they seem to actively buy in to the status where the government are our masters. They're not, they are literally our employees. We elect them to do what we want. But the state feels so far removed from this in practice now. I'm probably just more aware of it as I get older, but all the recent changes just show how little power people actually have. In theory, we could elect a government who undoes all the current institutionalised state power over people, and move to a more representative system, but in practice it is extremely difficult to impossible. I wouldn't mind this so much if the state wasn't so utterly useless at actually wielding this power. I look at a place like Singapore, and I see how most people not actually living in Singapore speak down about the supposed conditions Singaporeans must accept. And yet, as every state approaches this level of authoritarian, one thing you can say, at Singapore is actually good at being authoritarian. Stuff works. The plan is long, and works.
mytailorisrich 1mo ago
Frankly this is the least of the problems we have. There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.
crimsoneer 1mo ago
It's worth being aware the current police implementation of police LFR is explicitly not doing "tracking": it scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.
- inigyou 1mo ago
  What if I covered myself in pictures of wanted suspects?
dtnm 1mo ago
No government or enforcement agency will ever say no to more power.
xorcist 1mo ago
> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state I have no idea what you are referring to here but that is most certainly not the case in most democratic countries. Where common carrier or telecom immunity is a thing they do not want to know more than they are legally obliged to know.
- KaiserPro 1mo ago
  > but that is most certainly not the case Indeed, this is not the case in the UK. Its too fucking expensive, and the paper work to approve that is too fucking hard. Most of the time the state will request search logs from google instead. its far cheaper and much higher signal to noise. Also "intercept" evidence is inadmissible in court, so its not all that useful for convicting people. Don't get me wrong, the UK like the USA has the ability to do all of this. But its used for specific actions (ie find a bomb-y needle in a haystack) where direct action is required. AS I said, intercepted evidence won't convict someone here because it can't be used as evidence. so if they see that your messaging someone about planning some attrocity, you'll have to be caught in the act of planning, or a physical device with the messages have to be found.
alt227 1mo ago
> Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years. Its still just about possible in rural areas as long you dont go into cities or on motorways. When they outlaw cash that will be the nail in the coffin.
- charcircuit 1mo ago
  Documenting birth is legally required since the 1800s and gets sent to a national index. The state will have a name associated with them since birth making them unable to be anonymous.
  - codedokode 1mo ago
    So that you cannot avoid paying taxes and going to the war when the government decides so.
red_admiral 1mo ago
> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout. I have some sympathy for this as shoplifting is getting worse. Also, an acquaintance of mine works as a security guard at a Tesco and was attacked and injured with a syringe earlier this year, luckily he's ok but they haven't caught the attacker. The cameras at the time did not have facial recognition, though I can't judge if that would have made a difference. Thieves might ignore checkout completely, but there are also cameras capturing everyone entering and leaving the shop.
- surcap526 1mo ago
  [dead]
ben_w 1mo ago
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).
lonelyasacloud 1mo ago
>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)
echelon_musk 1mo ago
> anonymous travel... died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers. You can buy an Oyster card with cash and top it up with cash from machines at almost every station. It's still possible to travel somewhat anonymously this way. You can still use paper tickets if you're worried about your Oyster card being de-anonymised. But as you say, that is not the primary way of travel anymore. Edit: Points already stated by windowliker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256399
hn_submit 1mo ago
I personally blame all Brits since it's they who allowed their government to pass laws like the Online Safety Act and RIPA Part 2 without so much as a whimper, let alone protest. In other countries government buildings would've been set on fire.
beepdyboop 1mo ago
Makes me wonder, does anyone know of any countries with high living standards that do not have extensive surveillance? I live in Norway, and I assume I’m already being tracked in a lot of ways. Where would I move to, if I came to the point where I felt the downsides of surveillance was beyond the value of staying in the country?

by _fw 1mo ago

ceuk 1mo ago

> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state. How so? I'm with AAISP and I'd be very surprised if they were doing this. What are you referring to here?

inigyou 1mo ago
Good choice, but most other people are using capitalismslop ISPs that maximize value extraction. I hear prices are a bit higher at A&A.
- ceuk 1mo ago
  Yeah bit dearer but it's only ~£55 a month and feels like money well spent. They're an awesome company

dofm 1mo ago

> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state. Citation please. "Proactively" is just untrue.

_fw 1mo ago
There’s a specific GDPR carve out as outlined by the ICO here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/data-sharing/sharing-personal-data-with-law-enforcement-authorities/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re... I don’t have evidence that shows specific examples of where it happens, but the state apparatus for it to do so exists. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that it is happening on a daily basis.
- dofm 1mo ago
  That does not at all suggest that UK ISPs proactively share anything with the state. What it means is the GDPR doesn't stop ISPs choosing to share when asked, rather than waiting for the warranted request that will come, as long as there is a lawful basis. Again: I don't really have a problem with that. If you've ever used a website that arranges work for lone workers (freelancers who do site visits, freelance estate agents, models, dog walkers) then you'll presumably want the people who run those communities to feel able to choose to share with law enforcement when asked.
  - constantius 1mo ago
    I think your understanding of 'proactively' might just be different from parent's (and mine). I'd agree that entities that provide their users' data upon a simple request, and a carveout in regulations that allows (not forces) them to do so, fits the definition of proactive.
    - dofm 1mo ago
      Let's not get all Humpty Dumpty here. "Upon request" is reactive by definition. "Proactive" sharing would quite literally mean sharing on one's own initiative.

windowliker 1mo ago

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'.

bobthepanda 1mo ago
you don't even need all of that to track people. there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-reveals-which-celebs-dont-tip-and-who-frequents-strip-clubs https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...
- windowliker 1mo ago

Citizen_Lame 1mo ago

And yet, crime is doing fine. This tells you what the surveillance state is really for.

gambiting 1mo ago

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.

nervai 1mo ago
Well, this about protecting the state from people that threaten it or its policies. I don't think it ever was about making us live in a safer city. Snatched your phone? Sorry mate. But some old lady better not be walking around with a tshirt that says "I support Palestine Action".
- xp84 1mo ago
  It's strange to me that in your bubble you think the police in the UK are mainly there to hassle the "Palestine" protestors and interrupt their peaceful "From the river to the sea" chants. I would say it's a lot more serious that they did nothing to stop the organized Pakistani child-rape gangs, out of fear it might offend people to even acknowledge it. Either way I can agree with you that it doesn't seem like the police in the UK are using their great power to do much good.

d--b 1mo ago

Also I think that this is just adding face recognition on a already camera-ladden system.

hammock 1mo ago
“Just” is doing a lot of work there

andai 1mo ago

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_sociopol_nwo74.htm https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopo...

inigyou 1mo ago
This describes Germany.
philipallstar 1mo ago
"Why don't you have pronouns in your bio?" - 2022

hammock 1mo ago

> 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.

juiceland 1mo ago
I wish that Apple would make a way to require both FaceID and a passcode. This seems like an easy option to add.
- Cider9986 1mo ago
  GrapheneOS has Touch ID and a passcode as an option.
  - hdgvhicv 1mo ago
    And what happens when your Touch ID stops working I find biometrics to be quite fragile.
    - gardnr 1mo ago
      Wash your hands? /s
    - evilos 1mo ago
      You still have a separate password that authenticates you without biometrics. The touch + passcode is nice because even if someone watches you enter your passcode it won't matter unless they can spoof the fingerprint reader too, which is highly unlikely. And you can use a much shorter passcode for convenience.
- euroderf 1mo ago
  Something you have + Something you know. SOP.
nly 1mo ago
Don't 99% of people just use face or fingerprint unlocking?

burnt-resistor 1mo ago

You're accepting and normalizing deviancy through learned helplessness rather than rebelling and protesting it.

blini-kot 1mo ago

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

crimsoneer 1mo ago
It's worth pointing out this is specifically not mass tracking. LFR scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.
- lazide 1mo ago
  So they say, but how could you even verify it if true? History is replete with ‘oops, I guess we left that switch on after all!’ type situations, and this is perfect for it.
- mananaysiempre 1mo ago
  To continue GP’s point, in Moscow a “database of outstanding wanted suspects” was enough to get a well-known science writer[1] who publicly expressed her opposition to the war systematically harrassed by the police because she (a then-pregnant woman) matched a database record for, I kid you not, a draft evader. Reportedly some of the officers even admitted the absurdity[2] of the situation but, well, computer says detain. [1] Asya Kazantseva [2] Women can be subject to the draft if they’re doctors, radio engineers, or one of a handful of other professions, but thus far it’s very uncommon and either way not applicable in her case.
- filcuk 1mo ago
  This is fair, but it feels like it pushes another finger into the door of mass surveillance. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a few toggles away in the station software.

agumonkey 1mo ago

Are police forces faster to solve or avoid crimes due to surveillance at least ?

batrat 1mo ago
I wrote in another comment but basically yes. Also they can focus on other cases that require physical presence. No need to patrol the entire subway, put 100 police officers to just patrol, every station when you can have 2-3 guys watch the cameras and just 2-3 patrols ready for intervention.
- jimnotgym 1mo ago
  Faster to solve, but by not patrolling haven't they given up on detterence?
  - monooso 1mo ago
    Surely the deterrent is the possibility of being caught? If you're more likely to be caught due to the surveillance, logic would dictate that it's the greater deterrent.
    - jimnotgym 1mo ago
      My brother had his window smashed and bag stolen under a cctv camera in London. The police never even investigated. I would hazard to say that wouldn't have happened had a police officer been stood there instead. Some major shops in the UK have photographs of police officers on the door, because it reduces theft!
      - psd1 1mo ago
        I think this says more about dwindling police budgets than about the efficacy of surveillance or bobbies on the beat.
      - Gigachad 1mo ago

hengistbury 1mo ago

> 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.

ChocolateGod 1mo ago

> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state. Your ISP doesn't even know your web history outside of the domain name if they use SNI sniffing for content blocking. > Roadside CCTV captures your registration plate and tracks your vehicle across the country. I don't see the problem on this one. Roads are owned by the government.

jjav 1mo ago
> Roads are owned by the government. Roads are owned by the people. The government (should) be the servants of the interests of the people.
- red_admiral 1mo ago
  They are owned by the Crown, I think. That doesn't contradict your point.
- munksbeer 1mo ago
  Exactly. Exasperating how many people are not only oblivious to this, they seem to actively buy in to the status where the government are our masters. They're not, they are literally our employees. We elect them to do what we want. But the state feels so far removed from this in practice now. I'm probably just more aware of it as I get older, but all the recent changes just show how little power people actually have. In theory, we could elect a government who undoes all the current institutionalised state power over people, and move to a more representative system, but in practice it is extremely difficult to impossible. I wouldn't mind this so much if the state wasn't so utterly useless at actually wielding this power. I look at a place like Singapore, and I see how most people not actually living in Singapore speak down about the supposed conditions Singaporeans must accept. And yet, as every state approaches this level of authoritarian, one thing you can say, at Singapore is actually good at being authoritarian. Stuff works. The plan is long, and works.

mytailorisrich 1mo ago

Frankly this is the least of the problems we have. There seems to be a big lack of perspective and priorities, as well as consideration of root cause of things like surveillance, and perhaps this is by design.

crimsoneer 1mo ago

It's worth being aware the current police implementation of police LFR is explicitly not doing "tracking": it scans faces against an existing database of outstanding wanted suspects. If a match is made, it alerts the officers who are manning the camera there and then. It doesn't store anything that wasn't a match.

inigyou 1mo ago
What if I covered myself in pictures of wanted suspects?

dtnm 1mo ago

No government or enforcement agency will ever say no to more power.

xorcist 1mo ago

> Your ISP proactively shares your web history with the state I have no idea what you are referring to here but that is most certainly not the case in most democratic countries. Where common carrier or telecom immunity is a thing they do not want to know more than they are legally obliged to know.

KaiserPro 1mo ago
> but that is most certainly not the case Indeed, this is not the case in the UK. Its too fucking expensive, and the paper work to approve that is too fucking hard. Most of the time the state will request search logs from google instead. its far cheaper and much higher signal to noise. Also "intercept" evidence is inadmissible in court, so its not all that useful for convicting people. Don't get me wrong, the UK like the USA has the ability to do all of this. But its used for specific actions (ie find a bomb-y needle in a haystack) where direct action is required. AS I said, intercepted evidence won't convict someone here because it can't be used as evidence. so if they see that your messaging someone about planning some attrocity, you'll have to be caught in the act of planning, or a physical device with the messages have to be found.

alt227 1mo ago

> Being an anonymous citizen in the UK has been an impossibility for at least 20 years. Its still just about possible in rural areas as long you dont go into cities or on motorways. When they outlaw cash that will be the nail in the coffin.

charcircuit 1mo ago
Documenting birth is legally required since the 1800s and gets sent to a national index. The state will have a name associated with them since birth making them unable to be anonymous.
- codedokode 1mo ago
  So that you cannot avoid paying taxes and going to the war when the government decides so.

red_admiral 1mo ago

> Supermarkets in the UK point cameras at your face at self-checkout. I have some sympathy for this as shoplifting is getting worse. Also, an acquaintance of mine works as a security guard at a Tesco and was attacked and injured with a syringe earlier this year, luckily he's ok but they haven't caught the attacker. The cameras at the time did not have facial recognition, though I can't judge if that would have made a difference. Thieves might ignore checkout completely, but there are also cameras capturing everyone entering and leaving the shop.

surcap526 1mo ago
[dead]

ben_w 1mo ago

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).

lonelyasacloud 1mo ago

>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)

echelon_musk 1mo ago

> anonymous travel... died when they made bank cards and contactless the primary way to get through the barriers. You can buy an Oyster card with cash and top it up with cash from machines at almost every station. It's still possible to travel somewhat anonymously this way. You can still use paper tickets if you're worried about your Oyster card being de-anonymised. But as you say, that is not the primary way of travel anymore. Edit: Points already stated by windowliker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256399

hn_submit 1mo ago

I personally blame all Brits since it's they who allowed their government to pass laws like the Online Safety Act and RIPA Part 2 without so much as a whimper, let alone protest. In other countries government buildings would've been set on fire.

beepdyboop 1mo ago

Makes me wonder, does anyone know of any countries with high living standards that do not have extensive surveillance? I live in Norway, and I assume I’m already being tracked in a lot of ways. Where would I move to, if I came to the point where I felt the downsides of surveillance was beyond the value of staying in the country?