Sure the West and China are both turning into biometric dystopias buuuuuuuut ours delivers fried chicken to your train seat. - Naomi Wu, Shenzhen.
For some railroad lines in China, you can order food while on a train and have it delivered to you at a station. That requires finding the passenger quickly, so some combination of cell phone tracking and face recognition is used.[1] KFC is using this system.
China's approach to Big Brother is more like a service function. The Government knows who you are and what you're doing, but China has been like that for centuries. There's no tradition of anonymity. The older paper-based systems worked when people didn't move much. The newer technology is being used to provide routine services, such as convenience store checkout and finding purse snatchers.
London has a lot of cameras, but many of them are old, so they have poor resolution. Newer 4K surveillance cameras [2] finally have enough resolution to be useful for recognizing faces at 40 feet or so.
Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance. The "average Joe" has the "I got nothing to hide" and that "go get them paedophiles", which are very true statements.
We are talking about a nation that has 4,200,000 [1] cameras surveilling them and nobody bats an eye about this. For some reason, Britons have decided (or was forced to them and they didn't push back) that privacy is not necessary, so, let them have it.
What harm can 3 more cameras can do? :) (per kiosk, per street)
Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance.
Here's a true story, a few years ago I was supervising a diver training session at a swimming pool in London, it was closed to members of the public at the time. My locker was broken into, my phone, tablet, credit cards, car keys and bizarrely a load of Mexican money I happened to have in my wallet was stolen, as were a couple of other lockers. Thank God I hadn't driven in that evening, I'm sure the guy walked around all the local streets pushing the button and seeing if any cars lit up. That was the most annoying thing to get the car re-coded, I easily bricked all the devices and cancelled the cards, no activity was detected on them. Insurance replaced them. No idea what he wanted with or did with the pesos.
Anyway, the thief was caught on several CCTV cameras, should have been an easy job for the popo to pick him up, but actually, CCTV footage is next to useless. All you could tell was that he was 6-ish feet tall and approximate ethnicity. So I don't mind the pervasive surveillance, because it doesn't work anyway. I guess I am vaguely annoyed that taxpayer's money is wasted on any of it deployed by the government, but that's all. Maybe it at least has some deterrent effect, but this guy clearly wasn't bothered by being caught on camera at all, so probably not.
With state surveillance, I'd agree. I don't think things are so clear cut for private sector actors. Private CCTV is tolerated because it's a) typically not a networked system, b) rarely mined for analytics and c) often conflated with council run systems anyway.
We are Britons in Britain. There is no one living here by the name of Average Joe. There are a lot of cameras here, many more than than some other places apparently. The vast majority of those cameras are in town and city centres or on the motorways. It is possible that in Britain we are able to count better (and publish) than some other regions and hence look bad in this regard - who knows.
I don't feel more "surveilled" here than I do in say Italy, France or the US (all of which I am pretty familiar with). I will say that I do feel looked upon when driving along the M42, south of Birmingham, there are a lot of cameras there but that area is a massive cross-road for the UK and an obvious place to want to keep an eye on.
Push back? Will do when things really do go wrong. You don't know us ... mate.
Okay, I'm going to toss out downvote material because I think it's important to say.
> Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance.
I think Americans are actually 99% comfortable with massive surveillance but can't admit it because of our culture. We consume reality TV like no one's business, watch YouTube to see people do dumb things in real life, and just in general, feel the urge to record and capture everything.
The 1% we disagree with is when it happens to be us doing something we didn't want anyone to see because it's embarrassing or causes us some kind of hardship e.g. pay a fine for breaking a law.
Personally, even if I have something to hide, it's my responsibility to hide it, or to stop doing it, and therefore, the public good shouldn't be hindered because I'm a crappy person.
If we could implement a CCTV system with ACTUAL checks and balances i.e. used my authorities, regulated by a public authority, and monitored by some third-party NON-CORPORATE watchdog, I'll vote for it as often as they'd let me.
If it's 1% more effective at stopping sexual assaults, preventing kidnappings, or protecting us from mass shootings, then it's 100% worth it.
> (or was forced to them and they didn't push back )
How do you suggest that we should have pushed back? By voting the bastards out? The UK is actually quite good at that, but policy outlives politicians thanks to the civil service.
>> Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance. The "average Joe" has the "I got nothing to hide" and that "go get them paedophiles", which are very true statements.
The British just have their own ideas about privacy. I've lived here 12 years and I still don't understand how almost everybody leaves their blinds up with the lights on, after dark. It's not without risk either. I think it was last summer when, for a few nights, Creepy Old Dude would walk past my window mumbling "show us your pussy" and "show us your legs". On the other hand, every so often someone tars people leaving their blinds down or curtains drawn as "skivers" sleeping it off through the day while everyone else goes to work [1], or as potential terrorists hiding some nefarious plot [2].
Then again, when a few years ago, the Labour government passed a law introducing ID cards for every citizen, everybody went up in arms - citing everything from concers about the potential for abuse and discrimination against minorities, the access of third parties to the database etc. Even -I kid you not- the conflict of a national ID card with Human Rights legislation, which is usually portrayed as a "criminal's charter" [4].
But- nobody worries that this is the European nation with most cameras than any other, or about the "Snooper's charter" (a.k.a. the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 [5]). I guess people really feel they have nothing to fear. There may be a historical explanation for why the UK is like this: most other nations in Europe have at some point been under the control of a totalitarian government that spied on its citizens and used the information collected to brutally oppress them.
There is something very important in working out our tolerance to surveillance vs the utility that is absolutely impossible to get without risking surveillance.
I can't really articulate it yet, but reading this article it occurs to me how really the old phone system didn't offer much more in the way of privacy (every phone call was recorded), but it offered more in the way of obscurity. Now that our information systems and techniques are good enough that obscurity is increasingly becoming unreachable (even by design), we need to come to terms with what that really means.
It feels like a big loss, but every time I sit down to analyze what we've really lost, I never can identify anything actually valuable to me in contrast to the privacy rights that we already struggle to maintain.
But also, a consequence of a networked society is that people can cooperate to create systems that have remarkably disproportionate collecting capacity. In the same sense that the consequence of an industrialized society is that people can cooperate to create disproportionate manufacturing capacity. No amount of rules, conservative independence, liberal appeal, or public outcry can change that fundamental truth. Nor can we undo the march of technology without a fundamentally cataclysmic restructuring of the world's economy.
> I can't really articulate it yet, but reading this article it occurs to me how really the old phone system didn't offer much more in the way of privacy (every phone call was recorded)
Can you explain a bit more what you mean here? Where are you to make this statement (UK like the article?)? Are you just talking about calls on public phones? When you say "recorded" do you mean metadata only, or the actual audio?
Societies that willingly forego privacy in order to allow things like social credit scores will have a large competitive advantage. The effect on social interaction and interaction with the state will be similar to the effect that tripadvisor has on restaurants, or that uber and lyft have on taxi customer service.
Our historical models of losing privacy emphasise the state at the centre of the panoptican observing all citizens while remaining hidden themselves. Correctly implemented, technological tracking of services and employees and bureaucrats has the potential to be much more like true transparency, with everyone having a more accurate picture of everyone else's history of behaviour.
Whether you think that this is desirable or not is really about values and preferences, not an objective question. But I think it is objectively likely that a society like this would enjoy a competitive advantage in terms of organising its economy and society.
I don't know if these phone boxes will last for long, there have been plenty of efforts to repurpose them for free wifi, maps, local council services and so on but these experiments never last for that long.
The fundamental problem is the guy with the iPhone X has a contract for lots of 4G bandwidth and would prefer to just use that except for at home/work when the wifi gets used.
So you are left with customers for the service that have pay as you go SIM only contracts for an old iPhone 4S.
Mac address randomization is a must if your wifi is on in public (you don't even need to connect anywhere to be fingerprinted and tracked). Also use cookie self-destruct plugins for your browser.
Ah yet another attempt to keep the payphones division alive whilst I can feel sympathy for those stuck in payphones as a share holder of BT.A I do ask is this actually going to turn a profit.
I have an issue, when e.g. Argos is using my phone's wifi antenna (even when I'm not connected to their network) to track where do I walk within their stores.
I do accept the fact that any cell signal provider can also track my movements since I am using their antennas.
I do perfectly understand that the STATE (law, justice, etc.) can also track my movements, and does so, using due process (I hope). But a private corporate, to be seeing where do I walk, what do I use, for me it is a problem.
In the same spirit Google was slapped by openly tracking every WiFi signal their cars intercepted. What if I don't want MY home wifi, or MY phone's wifi be a tool for THEM to make billions? Why do I need to be a product for their greed?
Good question. Many people really don't like the incredible amount of cultural and political influence that these large multinational corporations are obtaining through data collection and analytics. This is just another example of corporate influence extending further into aspects of society that were formerly handled by the government.
This level of surveillance is a shame given that by luck of never being invaded by the Nazis there's no ID cards in the UK. Somehow also people managed to stop attempts to get ID cards introduced.
It might even be because of this. That is, it's easy for other European governments to track people as they have to carry ID at all times. Because the UK government are worried about the lack of this, they go down the CCTV route.
As a German, you could not be more wrong with your idea about ID cards. ID cards are not used to track your movement. There is no need to show an ID to the police unless they have suspicion that you committed a crime and confront you. There are no passport controls along roads. There is a huge difference between the scales at which passport controls and CCTV can be executed, too, because passport controls require work by a police officer, whereas CCTV can be automated with face recognition. Our police is understaffed, too, you rarely see them.
Whenever you use your ID card it is to buy alcohol or enter a concert, and police do not check the ID, but an employee of the venue. The employees just check the date of birth if you look like a young person, and sometimes if the picture is matching your face.
The UK government has an unhealthy obsession with surveillance but ID cards are a strange target. They offer nothing except convenience, considering if you ever want to buy alcohol or travel abroad as a Brit, then you have to get a driving license and a passport.
The end result is that something as simple as proving who you are on a document, or renewing your driving license, requires that you provide every address you've lived at for 3 years and essentially get a credit check. Electoral roll data is sold to third parties and is used for junk mail as much as it is identity checking.
An ID card would put that entire business venture to an end, because your personal ID number and embedded certificates would be more than enough to prove you are who you say you are. This is comparatively a blessing on the continent, where many EU countries have updated their tech. Being a Brit living around Europe for some years, the hoops I have to jump through to prove who I am in the UK are an incredible annoyance and my letter box is already filling with unwanted solicitations. I'm probably being tracked _more_ than I was with my EU ID cards!
I was wondering why they don't use old style phone boxes with new tech inside. But of course, someone will piss, take a shit or do drugs inside. Great way to ruin it guys.
Animats|8 years ago
For some railroad lines in China, you can order food while on a train and have it delivered to you at a station. That requires finding the passenger quickly, so some combination of cell phone tracking and face recognition is used.[1] KFC is using this system.
China's approach to Big Brother is more like a service function. The Government knows who you are and what you're doing, but China has been like that for centuries. There's no tradition of anonymity. The older paper-based systems worked when people didn't move much. The newer technology is being used to provide routine services, such as convenience store checkout and finding purse snatchers.
London has a lot of cameras, but many of them are old, so they have poor resolution. Newer 4K surveillance cameras [2] finally have enough resolution to be useful for recognizing faces at 40 feet or so.
[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-07/13/content_300925... [2] https://www.lorextechnology.com/articles/What-is-4k-Video/R-...
HenryBemis|8 years ago
We are talking about a nation that has 4,200,000 [1] cameras surveilling them and nobody bats an eye about this. For some reason, Britons have decided (or was forced to them and they didn't push back) that privacy is not necessary, so, let them have it.
What harm can 3 more cameras can do? :) (per kiosk, per street)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
gaius|8 years ago
Here's a true story, a few years ago I was supervising a diver training session at a swimming pool in London, it was closed to members of the public at the time. My locker was broken into, my phone, tablet, credit cards, car keys and bizarrely a load of Mexican money I happened to have in my wallet was stolen, as were a couple of other lockers. Thank God I hadn't driven in that evening, I'm sure the guy walked around all the local streets pushing the button and seeing if any cars lit up. That was the most annoying thing to get the car re-coded, I easily bricked all the devices and cancelled the cards, no activity was detected on them. Insurance replaced them. No idea what he wanted with or did with the pesos.
Anyway, the thief was caught on several CCTV cameras, should have been an easy job for the popo to pick him up, but actually, CCTV footage is next to useless. All you could tell was that he was 6-ish feet tall and approximate ethnicity. So I don't mind the pervasive surveillance, because it doesn't work anyway. I guess I am vaguely annoyed that taxpayer's money is wasted on any of it deployed by the government, but that's all. Maybe it at least has some deterrent effect, but this guy clearly wasn't bothered by being caught on camera at all, so probably not.
timthorn|8 years ago
gerdesj|8 years ago
I don't feel more "surveilled" here than I do in say Italy, France or the US (all of which I am pretty familiar with). I will say that I do feel looked upon when driving along the M42, south of Birmingham, there are a lot of cameras there but that area is a massive cross-road for the UK and an obvious place to want to keep an eye on.
Push back? Will do when things really do go wrong. You don't know us ... mate.
dvdhnt|8 years ago
> Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance.
I think Americans are actually 99% comfortable with massive surveillance but can't admit it because of our culture. We consume reality TV like no one's business, watch YouTube to see people do dumb things in real life, and just in general, feel the urge to record and capture everything.
The 1% we disagree with is when it happens to be us doing something we didn't want anyone to see because it's embarrassing or causes us some kind of hardship e.g. pay a fine for breaking a law.
Personally, even if I have something to hide, it's my responsibility to hide it, or to stop doing it, and therefore, the public good shouldn't be hindered because I'm a crappy person.
If we could implement a CCTV system with ACTUAL checks and balances i.e. used my authorities, regulated by a public authority, and monitored by some third-party NON-CORPORATE watchdog, I'll vote for it as often as they'd let me.
If it's 1% more effective at stopping sexual assaults, preventing kidnappings, or protecting us from mass shootings, then it's 100% worth it.
rahoulb|8 years ago
Of course, there is a grey-area with government surveillance when things like ANPR services are outsourced with completely opaque contracts.
dingaling|8 years ago
How do you suggest that we should have pushed back? By voting the bastards out? The UK is actually quite good at that, but policy outlives politicians thanks to the civil service.
benbristow|8 years ago
YeGoblynQueenne|8 years ago
The British just have their own ideas about privacy. I've lived here 12 years and I still don't understand how almost everybody leaves their blinds up with the lights on, after dark. It's not without risk either. I think it was last summer when, for a few nights, Creepy Old Dude would walk past my window mumbling "show us your pussy" and "show us your legs". On the other hand, every so often someone tars people leaving their blinds down or curtains drawn as "skivers" sleeping it off through the day while everyone else goes to work [1], or as potential terrorists hiding some nefarious plot [2].
Then again, when a few years ago, the Labour government passed a law introducing ID cards for every citizen, everybody went up in arms - citing everything from concers about the potential for abuse and discrimination against minorities, the access of third parties to the database etc. Even -I kid you not- the conflict of a national ID card with Human Rights legislation, which is usually portrayed as a "criminal's charter" [4].
But- nobody worries that this is the European nation with most cameras than any other, or about the "Snooper's charter" (a.k.a. the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 [5]). I guess people really feel they have nothing to fear. There may be a historical explanation for why the UK is like this: most other nations in Europe have at some point been under the control of a totalitarian government that spied on its citizens and used the information collected to brutally oppress them.
But I'm sure that will never happen in the UK.
_______________
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2012/oct/08/curtai...
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10929203
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006#Object...
[4] Search for "Human rights laws are a charter for criminals, say 75% of Britons". I'm not linking to the Daily Mail directly.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016
musage|8 years ago
[deleted]
KirinDave|8 years ago
I can't really articulate it yet, but reading this article it occurs to me how really the old phone system didn't offer much more in the way of privacy (every phone call was recorded), but it offered more in the way of obscurity. Now that our information systems and techniques are good enough that obscurity is increasingly becoming unreachable (even by design), we need to come to terms with what that really means.
It feels like a big loss, but every time I sit down to analyze what we've really lost, I never can identify anything actually valuable to me in contrast to the privacy rights that we already struggle to maintain.
But also, a consequence of a networked society is that people can cooperate to create systems that have remarkably disproportionate collecting capacity. In the same sense that the consequence of an industrialized society is that people can cooperate to create disproportionate manufacturing capacity. No amount of rules, conservative independence, liberal appeal, or public outcry can change that fundamental truth. Nor can we undo the march of technology without a fundamentally cataclysmic restructuring of the world's economy.
magnetic|8 years ago
Can you explain a bit more what you mean here? Where are you to make this statement (UK like the article?)? Are you just talking about calls on public phones? When you say "recorded" do you mean metadata only, or the actual audio?
ppod|8 years ago
Our historical models of losing privacy emphasise the state at the centre of the panoptican observing all citizens while remaining hidden themselves. Correctly implemented, technological tracking of services and employees and bureaucrats has the potential to be much more like true transparency, with everyone having a more accurate picture of everyone else's history of behaviour.
Whether you think that this is desirable or not is really about values and preferences, not an objective question. But I think it is objectively likely that a society like this would enjoy a competitive advantage in terms of organising its economy and society.
Theodores|8 years ago
The fundamental problem is the guy with the iPhone X has a contract for lots of 4G bandwidth and would prefer to just use that except for at home/work when the wifi gets used.
So you are left with customers for the service that have pay as you go SIM only contracts for an old iPhone 4S.
jstanley|8 years ago
lokopodium|8 years ago
myopicgoat|8 years ago
defo_nonconvex|8 years ago
Reason077|8 years ago
walshemj|8 years ago
slackuser|8 years ago
HenryBemis|8 years ago
I do accept the fact that any cell signal provider can also track my movements since I am using their antennas.
I do perfectly understand that the STATE (law, justice, etc.) can also track my movements, and does so, using due process (I hope). But a private corporate, to be seeing where do I walk, what do I use, for me it is a problem.
In the same spirit Google was slapped by openly tracking every WiFi signal their cars intercepted. What if I don't want MY home wifi, or MY phone's wifi be a tool for THEM to make billions? Why do I need to be a product for their greed?
TheAdamAndChe|8 years ago
stordoff|8 years ago
aluhut|8 years ago
justinclift|8 years ago
When they start enabling the cameras, thereby likely capturing passers-by too, things could get tricky.
icc97|8 years ago
It might even be because of this. That is, it's easy for other European governments to track people as they have to carry ID at all times. Because the UK government are worried about the lack of this, they go down the CCTV route.
bayerrr|8 years ago
Whenever you use your ID card it is to buy alcohol or enter a concert, and police do not check the ID, but an employee of the venue. The employees just check the date of birth if you look like a young person, and sometimes if the picture is matching your face.
ljm|8 years ago
The end result is that something as simple as proving who you are on a document, or renewing your driving license, requires that you provide every address you've lived at for 3 years and essentially get a credit check. Electoral roll data is sold to third parties and is used for junk mail as much as it is identity checking.
An ID card would put that entire business venture to an end, because your personal ID number and embedded certificates would be more than enough to prove you are who you say you are. This is comparatively a blessing on the continent, where many EU countries have updated their tech. Being a Brit living around Europe for some years, the hoops I have to jump through to prove who I am in the UK are an incredible annoyance and my letter box is already filling with unwanted solicitations. I'm probably being tracked _more_ than I was with my EU ID cards!
AndyMcConachie|8 years ago
[deleted]
timthorn|8 years ago
jotm|8 years ago