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-...
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...
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.
It's even worse, it means the police know it doesn't track criminals and so just want to track regular people.
It tests the water of how much the population is willing to be under surveillance.
Like boiling a frog you don't notice how much surveillance there is until it's too late.
The quality of CCTV footage (or lack of) is well known. How many times have you seen a news report with a blurry photo of a suspect and a plea for information? This is vague proof that mass surveillance is ineffective unless you throw serious manpower at it.
This is what happens in the case of serious terrorism cases, where the police can wave RIPA around and subpoena footage from everyone, but presumably tracking between cameras still requires a lot of manual intervention (and therefore money). Catching a locker thief isn't worth it.
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.
Problem is, if things "really" do go wrong, it will be too late to push back.
> 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.
Is a 1% reduction in any crime really worth a totalitarian world where the state can hunt down people who disagree with them?
I didn't get past that first sentence of irrelevant filler.
Of course, there is a grey-area with government surveillance when things like ANPR services are outsourced with completely opaque contracts.
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.
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.
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[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
Regarding blinds, I doubt many people even think about it - you aren't doing anything private (or even interesting most of the time), so it just doesn't occur to you. It's also generally considered rude to stare into people's houses, so even if they can, there is a general presumption that people won't. It's quite possibly related to your last paragraph - there's no culture of shielding your day-to-day life because they has never been anything really to shield it from ("no need to hide" being subtly different to "nothing to hide" - even people with things they would rather not be public don't necessarily see the need to conceal them from the government).
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.
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?
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.
'Social credit scores' muddy this system with a bunch of basically peripheral values: filial piety, political opinions, and so on. It undermines the basic efficiency of a system that only cares about you insofar as you matter - i.e. insofar as you're economically active.
The only way a 'social credit score' will help the system that institutes it is if the society is more stable as a result. I don't really see this happening, unless people like it. If everybody hates a society, you tend to get a kind of creeping malaise, where nobody believes in the system, and everybody's just trying to steal as much as they can from it - sort of like Russia in the 80's. No amount of repression will help you if all of your secret police are busy trying to sell every state asset they can get their hands on.
But I agree that the fundamental struggle with legible societies is asymmetry of access to data and a fair and open access leads to fairer outcomes.
As for a "competitive advantage" personally I think such concepts are nonsensical and over prioritize the personal experience of those at the top of huge social hierarchies rather than any reality.
Similarly the competitive advantages you describe may come with long-term risks that are harder to measure or predict, especially those that come from the government itself.
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.
Preventing forms of tracking that are actually in use is much easier.
Hopefully in the future the implementation will improve. Until then WiFi is off.
I don't think my door lock is going to protect me against a professional locksmith, having one is nonetheless still useful.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kismetwire...
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?
McDonald will sell my data when i use they WiFi. My network provider will sell my data, my phone provider. Fitness company also will sell me.
Facebook consider me as a product for 5-6 years already.
I think in modern society it is a normal thing
When they start enabling the cameras, thereby likely capturing passers-by too, things could get tricky.
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.
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.
You are required to have an ID on you at all times. If you don't have an ID on you you've committed an offence.
It makes it very easy for police to find identities of people they question. In the UK you have the privacy that you haven't committed an offence by not having an ID so the police can't detain you. So you can just give a fake address and the police can't do anything.
Why do you think he's German?
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!
Sure your data gets sold, but if you're careful and you care about it you can keep your anonymity. That's a precious thing that you can never have with ID cards because you're illegal in most of the rest of Europe if you don't have one.
