alt Hacker News500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive
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my mom lives in small town that only has two roads in/out of town and the police have alprs on those. there's no violent crime there, and all the police department does is traffic (DWI's, speeding and parking tickets, and accidents) and respond to small town crime (noise complaints, stolen bicycle, stray/lost dogs etc). I think the only thing that the alpr has ever caught people for is out of date vehicle registrations - but now the police department wants a flock camera because they are "great crime fighting tools"
I was thinking about this with flock cameras the other day...what's our actual ROI? Was the world horrible before and these initiatives are going to close a monster crime gap or is this just a giant fishing expedition ... just because?
I've had an idea in the back of my head but I'm no businessman so have this one for free.
Build an AI model, train it from the catalogues of JD Sports and Sports Direct (and other brands like Stone Island etc.) and how to detect balaclavas, illegal electric bikes and e-scooters. Have it link to cameras and do a percentage chance using machine learning on chance of crime. Also increase the percentage if a 'wheely' is done (riding only on back wheel).
Would minority report the majority of crime in this country in one fell swoop.
Could call it ScroteScanner.
Some would call it discrimination but the majority of ASB I see around my area are people dressed/using those exact things.
If they start to catch-on (unlikely) then worse case we have a fancier looking society with gangsters in suits again.
I guess that tells you how expensive travelling by trains is then, if in 6 months only 500k unique faces were captured or identified. That is roughly 3k per day or 120-150 every hour or 2-3 every minute across multiple stations. Unfortunately, this exercise would be labelled as too expensive to be scaled, the irony. Surely, the preference for the department is buying rather than building their own cost effective solutions inhouse which would be scalable rather than limited. Look at France and Netherlands, their government departments are already working on reducing reliance on microsoft products. This has to come from the very top, rather than being consumers these departments with their budgets should become tech producers.
Man we technologists are so bad at dealing with societal issues.
We try to reinvent something that claims that keeps tabs on everyone and for sure will punish you if you don’t behave well but will reward you if do!
The thing has a name. It’s the religion.
I’m very against this type of pervasive surveillance, but that number seems implausible. The police may have only loaded a small group of suspects into the system, only targeted specific individuals, or some other reason we’re not aware of. The police protecting some criminals wouldn’t be a departure from standard practice in the UK.
The cameras in UK are there to remember citizens that they are watched. They are there for when there are peaceful protests to remember citizens that they are watched. Surveillance state created by cameras on the streets and tracking on everybody's phones is perfectly ok for our rulers.
I hear again and again that China is "bad" but I see that western countries copy everything from them... except going after big corporations. We will gather personal data and have files for each citizen, punish peaceful protests, use social media to control the masses but punishing the rich like China does is unacceptable. That seems to be the red line that the West will not cross, the one that protects billionaries.
I don’t think it’s fair to conclude this doesn’t work at all.
The reason they did not get any arrests could be that sought-for criminals now avoid those stations. Given that there are relatively few of such criminals, that’s hard to prove or disprove (traffic would go down, but only by a slight amount)
It also could mean such criminals already avoided those stations, to start with. Again, hard to prove.
It also might mean people misbehave less now at these stations. So, did the number of incidents at such stations go down?
That, I think should be easier to (dis)prove, but also doesn’t require running live face recognition. Recording and only looking at recordings after an issue is reported would be the better option.
UK is doing it wrong.
They would get their best arrest rate with a microphone or printed words.
Camera? We just released a terrorist team spotted by an eyewitness.
/very sarcastcally, sardonically, and facetiously
This is misleading in so many ways...
Their watchlist was only ~450 people, and it was restricted to people relevant to the transport police. The system was also overt and clearly marked, there were alternative routes that avoided the cameras and even then they were on 3-6 hours per day.
The headline suggests this system is not only invasive but also ineffective. While I agree it's a privacy nightmare, I also think those idiotic deployment conditions set them up for failure. At least we know there aren't many false positives, it could've been worse.
The worst crime at UK stations is the price of rail tickets.
(I'm here all week. Try the lobster.)
Its just a start though right? Most people here are male and aren't that scared to be out and about. The women in my life have a much different outlook on things, I really think CCTVs and AI can really help make things safer.
You can see with videos already helping to catch people (and potentially scaring people off from committing crime in the first place).
Yes its a problem in the US where its criminal system is inconsistent at best, but the UK at least has much fairer legal system.
I know someone involved in this. They put up huge signs saying you’re going to be recorded, and offer an unrecorded route to go down if you don’t want to be checked… so obviously all the criminals just go down that route.
It’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Classic Britain. Wouldn’t want the criminals to be filmed without their consent!
I'm sure somehow this will pivot to enforcing taxes though
I think this means we need more cameras!
After reading just the first paragraph the tv show “Person of interest” immediately came to my mind
> violence against women and girls, whose travel behaviours are shaped by experiences of sexual harassment and sexual offences”.
So much effort to protect little girls. Yet if you get stabbed, say clearly that you've been stabbed, they will not believe you. Then they will arrest your dead body.
Highly recommend the BBC series The Capture
Where does this end? Drones following each of us every time we leave our homes and otherwise peeking through our windows, doing spectrum analysis, etc.?
Let me off this stupid ride, please.
Good news: rolling these facial scans everywhere in the country should lead to dozens of false positives.
Is this just a stupid headline? do you think there should be more crimes per 500,000 people seen on a portion of the metro? My metro has 1 million riders a day I don’t think it has even one serious crime per week…?
Someone is making a lot of money from it and law enforcement is too thick to see that.
This is an interesting KPI
Fare evasion will be a big use-case for facial recognition at railway stations. I wonder when they will admit it, if they haven't fairly secretively already. Same as bodyworn cameras (initially introduced to reduce assaults, now they admit they're used to tackle fare evasion too)
It really won't be long until your face is scanned well before you get to the barrier, then an alarm goes off and blocks the barrier. Or it detects barrier-pushing then automatically begins an investigation or issues a fine.
And of course there is facial recognition + AI for retail profit maximisation
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/national/24397770.network-rail-...
Trust the railway as far as you can throw it...
100% success!
So now that the "trial" has failed we're going to stop doing face scanning, right? ...right???
"Most everyone you meet is not a criminal"
Uncomfortable facts certain bigots dont want to understand.
I mean a lot of our lives, resemble 1984, but this is literally the UK, where 1984 was set. And then they are doing all of the 1984 activities with no shame whatsoever.
Hitler was elected democratically. Democracy is non-excuse for the complete destruction of civil liberties.
> We know the technology works, but using it in supermarkets to deter shoplifters and prevent attacks on staff is very different from deploying it to catch people on a public transport network. Success in a shop means no such people coming in. Success for the police trying to catch people means people being caught. In that respect the trial doesn’t appear to have been very fruitful.
ahahaha. "My magical face detection software worked because (according to our detection software) none of the undesirables came in!"
Security theater is out of control. I just returned from traveling abroad to some major cities in Europe and getting back to NYC, it's the only city I've been in that let's the cops run wild and fly helicopters low over the city. Not so the cops can do any actual work but so they can take a 2 minute short cut to their private helicopter base instead of flying over the water. No person I have ever met enjoys the sudden loud noise from helicopters flying just above their head in the middle of the day/night. There are campaigns against it[0], and people despise cops. It would be such an easy win to gain some better relations with the communities and yet the cops keep on doing it.
The cops keeps doing it and the rich join in on holidays to take a shortcut to JFK from downtown Manhattan. The city were 9/11 was apparently a big deal wants to you feel like you're in a war zone all the time for shortcuts and a few $ savings on helicopter fuel.
This to me is the ultimate security theater environment, where the state is constantly pressing a false sense of FUD.
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16 deployments for 6 months at rail stations - they must have been off 99% of the time to only scan 500k faces.
For scale 500k people is 2 days of Liverpool Street Stations daily average