When do we get the thought police?
para-government tech companies are working as hard on that as possible, it will be soon. It doesn’t even matter if it really works, they’ll just say it does.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The police will be able to run facial recognition searches on a database containing images of Britain’s 50 million driving licence holders under a law change being quietly introduced by the government.
Should the police wish to put a name to an image collected on CCTV, or shared on social media, the legislation would provide them with the powers to search driving licence records for a match.
The move, contained in a single clause in a new criminal justice bill, could put every driver in the country in a permanent police lineup, according to privacy campaigners.
The intention to allow the police or the National Crime Agency (NCA) to exploit the UK’s driving licence records is not explicitly referenced in the bill or in its explanatory notes, raising criticism from leading academics that the government is “sneaking it under the radar”.
The policing minister, Chris Philp, made a first explicit reference to what appears to be the unsaid purpose of the legislative change during a first committee sitting of MPs scrutinising the bill on 12 December.
Questioning Graeme Biggar, the director general of the National Crime Agency, Philp said: “There is a power in clause 21 to allow police and law enforcement, including the NCA, to access driving licence records to do a facial recognition search, which, anomalously, is currently quite difficult.
The original article contains 1,028 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
CCTV, or shared on social media
going to lead to a horrifying amount of false positives but i’m sure that’s not really a downside to them
You have to renew your driver’s license every 10 years. That means in the worst case scenario, the image they’re using of you could be 10 years out of date.
Those images are also not detailed enough to be used for facial recognition. Sure, it could help narrow down the list of suspected people, but they’re crazy if they think they’d be able to pinpoint someone based on what they looked like 5-10 years prior.
I suspect these powers are being used for something else more sinister. Immigration, for example, to clamp down on people who have licenses and are delivery drivers, or taxi drivers for example.
It’s not the kind of search where they need to be very precise; certainly not pinpoint accuracy. t’s just another tool to narrow their searches that rely on other details.
And if you’re a fully grown adult, not undergoing radical facial reconstruction, it seems unlikely to be that the relative distances and orientations of your eyes, nose, and mouth are going to change very much. My driver’s license photo is at least a decade old and even though my face looks different on the surface due to age, changes in weight, and changes in hair color and length I’d bet my key features are still in relatively the same places.
Of course they could also be using this for more sinister purposes. No argument there.
I hate my country and the old removed who are clueless on what they’re allowing. The old adage “you can get the toothpaste out, you can’t put it back.”
