UK’s GDPR replacement could wipe out oversight of live facial recognition

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/19/dpib_2_surveillance_oversight/

by belter • 3 years ago

186 137 3 years ago

theregister.com

Havoc• 3 years ago

Can't say I'm surprised - london is famously cctv heavy

mikelovenotwar• 3 years ago

For all the good it does....

ChrisKnott2• 3 years ago

It does lots of good. What's your point?

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Edit: I presume drive-by downvoters supported the conviction of Wayne Couzens?

ex3ndr• 3 years ago

No, it is CCTV heavy, but most cameras are private, not public and not part of the single network.

jklrtx• 3 years ago

Meanwhile, Sunak is celebrating himself with a nauseating propaganda video:

https://twitter.com/RishiSunak/status/1660560546465193984

Look how clean and groomed our dear leaders are while they are surveilling the population and ruin the economy. Whatever it takes!

kmlx2• 3 years ago

i find that video to be pretty well made. what exactly is the problem here?

dewclin2• 3 years ago

Returning back to the OT of surveillance and oversight, and as you're making this into a partisan issue, what would Labour do differently?

"Authoritarian" concerns were expressed last time Labour was in government [1], and they're "seriously considering" resurrecting their policy of mandatory id cards if they get in power again [2].

And, before I get smeared as a "Tory"/"Brexiteer", I am not - I'm someone who remembers what happened last time Labour was in power and see neither party offers an alternative to increasing surveillance in the UK.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/apr/24/commen...

[2] https://labourlist.org/2022/11/mandatory-id-card-policy-shou...

ChrisKnott2• 3 years ago

Lots of EU countries have ID cards, this is not something enabled by Brexit. I don't really get the dystopian angle to it either. Do countries with ID cards see them as authoritarian?

tailspin20192• 3 years ago

as you're making this into a partisan issue

Criticising the current PM doesn't automatically make it a partisan issue IMHO.

Personally I don't actually care what party they're in. I care how {badly} the {party who are currently in power} are running the country.

neither party offers an alternative to increasing surveillance in the UK

I agree. They're all worthy of criticsm at the moment. And particularly the ones currently in power.

captainbland3• 3 years ago

Authoritarianism is very much so bi-partisan in UK politics.

That said I do think the Tories have taken it to the n-th degree recently, though. It's unlikely that Labour would introduce new bills that are quite as heavy handed as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 but I imagine they're unlikely to unwind what is currently there now.

clnq3• 3 years ago

A prompt to do it yourself:

GPT-4, make a generic 90-second UK political ad script about a G7 meeting in Japan. We don't have much footage, so slow it down and fill it with B-roll. Focus on nonspecific virtues, like freedom and peace. Include quotes from the main politician, and even though it's a video about G7, do a section on Zelensky and Ukrainian conflict.

It keeps writing much better scripts though.

phatfish2• 3 years ago

Defending democracy in Ukraine is one of the few instances where I agree with the current UK government.

tailspin20192• 3 years ago

100% agree.

For all the things I can think of to complain about our current government, this is not one of them.

concordDance• 3 years ago

This doesn't seem like a productive comment.

londons_explore• 3 years ago

Writing a law that says it is illegal to do facial recognition with a computer, but okay do use humans to recognise other humans is stupid.

The end result is you'll just have sweatshops of people watching CCTV streams clicking matching face images because it's illegal to get a computer to do it automatically.

web3-is-a-scam• 3 years ago

Think of all the new jobs this will create! (/s if it’s not obvious)

lopis• 3 years ago

You'll never be able to do with people what computer vision systems do today, no matter how many people you hire. We're way past that.

hkt3• 3 years ago

The end result is that it isn't economical or practical to do it. Which is a resoundingly good thing.

cassianoleal• 3 years ago

Precisely. Which is also why we need strong E2EE assurances. I heard the argument that physical phone lines have already been prone to interception so banning E2EE (or mandating backdoors) would be similar. The difference is that wiretapping requires a lot of work and is expensive and as such has to be done only for specific cases. Backdooring E2EE means cheap population-level surveillance.

detaro• 3 years ago

The end result is you'll just have sweatshops of people watching CCTV streams clicking matching face images because it's illegal to get a computer to do it automatically.

Good luck explaining how that isn't "data processing".

rsynnott2• 3 years ago

The East Germans tried manual total surveillance. It didn’t work. Like, it was a horrifically oppressive police state, but it fell short of the full potential of horrific police-state-ness largely due to practicalities.

Automating mass surveillance is dangerous; it makes _possible_ levels of societal control which simply weren’t possible for even the most aggressively dedicated police states of the past. It’s a bit of a Pandora’s box, and probably best left closed.

tehwebguy• 3 years ago

Well, yes, if UK is passing a law it is absolutely going to reduce privacy and rights.

afavour3• 3 years ago

This kind of thing was always my biggest worry going into Brexit. The country has to reimplement a ton of regulation and you know the government and its various hangers on won’t be able to resist “tweaking” every law and regulation to better favour them.

Workers rights, human rights… it’s all up for negotiation now. By people who aren’t listening to you.

EliRivers• 3 years ago

When the UK was in the EU, I was protected from some of the worst excesses of the UK government. The UK didn't leave the EU to make those protections stronger...

afavour3• 3 years ago

No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. You were subject to the tyranny of bureaucrats.

kmlx2• 3 years ago

the regulation is a joke anyway, so why pretend? same with gdpr and the so called online privacy. it’s all smoke and mirrors with an added serving of mixed anti-americanism and european protectionism. they should remove everything from the books until these things have heft. and if they can’t come up with something serious, why legislate in the first place? just for populism’s sake? (eg UK’s online safety bill)

wafflemaker• 3 years ago

What you call a joke does work albeit slowly. Most of pages have a 'reject all' button now. It didn't get there in the first iteration, but the effect is nice now. As a bonus, you quickly see who works in bad faith, by how it's implemented.

tobylane• 3 years ago

What is heft in this context?

martinald• 3 years ago

But it's clear GDPR isn't working as intended. The compliance costs are absolutely enormous and EU member state national courts are leading to rule virtually every tech product being in noncompliance with it, as it so broad.

It's likely to lead to the quasi-ban of LLMs sooner rather than later in the EU. This is going to be an enormous challenge to the EUs tech industry if UK and US firms can use LLMs but EU companies can't.

While I lean remain; some people seem to have serious blind spots that a _lot_ of EU legislation is poorly thought out and given the slow pace of change extremely hard to revoke once it is in force (cf the ridiculous cookie banners; which were implemented in law in 2002 and _still_ haven't been changed, despite 10+ years of efforts to do so in the EU institutions). It's going to be even worse with the EU Digital Services Act, where being in compliance with GDPR and the DSA is a lawyers dream, as from what I understand it directly contradicts each other.

chpatrick• 3 years ago

The compliance costs are absolutely enormous and EU member state national courts are leading to rule virtually every tech product being in noncompliance with it, as it so broad.

Isn't that intended?

afavour3• 3 years ago

While I lean remain; some people seem to have serious blind spots that a _lot_ of EU legislation is poorly thought

Oh, I'm not blind to it. My calculation is a simple one: looking at where we were and where are now, where would I prefer to be? For me it's not a difficult conclusion.

This is going to be an enormous challenge to the EUs tech industry if UK and US firms can use LLMs but EU companies can't

Sure, but your argument completely disregards the privacy concerns which is the reason the EU has done what it's done. It's possible for Europe to decide that it's worth the cost in potential business to protect the privacy of its citizens. That's essentially what GDPR decided, after all.

(FWIW I've worked on GDPR implementations, I'm not so convinced it's a failure. It lead to a very meaningful drop in the amount of personal information the company was storing. The compliance costs were not particularly huge ongoing costs, just upfront implementation ones)

johannes12343212• 3 years ago

Right, it isn't working. Facebook/Meta was fined a billion today, but still will not respect user's privacy.

it_citizen• 3 years ago

What does "working as intended" means?

Some sibling comments challenge that it doesn't help reduce the amount of private data stored.

I would argue that GDPR is working as intended on the economic war front. The US weaponized their extraterritorial anti-corruption laws, China is also building similar legal weapons, GDPR is part of the european answer to that: a framework to catch up with other super powers who can pressure foreign companies whenever it pleases them.

raverbashing3• 3 years ago

It's likely to lead to the quasi-ban of LLMs sooner rather than later in the EU

It won't be GDPR but newer regs

This is going to be an enormous challenge to the EUs tech industry if UK and US firms can use LLMs but EU companies can't

I'm sure they'll find a way

a _lot_ of EU legislation is poorly thought out and given the slow pace of change extremely hard to revoke once it is in force

Kinda, but things don't change only by the original legislative process, but by subsequent regulations, agency reviews (like data protection organisms), judicial reviews, etc

which were implemented in law in 2002 and _still_ haven't been changed, despite 10+ years of efforts to do so in the EU institutions

I'd love to know what kind of discussions went in regards to the cookie law and GDPR in legislative reviews. I'm sure it's all logged in a very verbose way in multiple websites and it would be some effort to get it all together

And the AI act worries me, but we know that actual enforcement and definitions and wiggle rooms exists (and as with GDPR, enforcement is kinda patchy)

pjc504• 3 years ago

How _do_ you make an LLM trained on people's personal information comply with privacy law?

pnw• 3 years ago

I’m in the EU this week and I had no idea that the cookie banners were so obnoxious, every site has a huge page blocking banner, and plenty of US news sites seem to block EU traffic entirely. I had to use a VPN to access some sites.

dukeyukey6• 3 years ago

I did quite a bit of work implementing GDPR compliance not long before it became enforceable and it was quite easy? Basically we had to make sure we knew where data was kept and how to delete/retrieve it. The biggest piece of work was making sure our logs didn't have personal info in them (sensible anyway imo) and adding proper log rotation.

Like every company will be different, but you really should know where your data is kept.

sharperguy• 3 years ago

Could have been a great opportunity to try to actually improve things rather than adding loopholes for the benefit of special interests. Maybe with the right people in power that could still be achieved, but seems unlikely.

SV_BubbleTime2• 3 years ago

I don’t know, you’re talking about a surveillance-crazy culture, I don’t see them shying away from facial recognition.

dijit3• 3 years ago

Yes, but this is the UK government. They are not benevolent. At every opportunity presented: they erode our rights, unless it has significant public support and costs absolutely nothing. (like gay marriage).

As soon as anything impedes special interests even slightly, be sure it will be legislated out of existence if possible.

One argument brexiteers trot out commonly is that EU regulations make it hard to be competitive. But human rights should impede "competition" otherwise it's a race to the bottom.

Timon3• 3 years ago

It could have been, but realistically only if the goal is "find problems in current legislation and improve". They started from "repeal current legislation and replace". It's like a developer deciding to just rewrite the legacy system, it won't lead you to your desired outcome.

blitzar• 3 years ago

Could have been a great opportunity to try to actually improve things rather than adding loopholes for the benefit of special interests.

The reality is that the EU legislation was toxic and loopholed at the behest of the UK and its special interests. The UK was not a moderating influence, but the UK was the one calling for no encryption and spying of the population.

If given a chance to improve or remove legislation the UK government will remove it NOT because its an assault on freedom and liberty, but because they dont think it goes far enough in curtailing freedom and liberty.

mijamo• 3 years ago

You didn't need Brexit to "improve" this kind of things, countries can already go beyond EU regulations on their own.

zepn• 3 years ago

Could have been a great opportunity to try to actually improve things rather than adding loopholes for the benefit of special interests.

But the kind of people who want the policy that Brexit is - i.e. xenophobic nationalists - are not the kind of people you'd want to take such an opportunity.

Membership of the EU was a great opportunity. Brexit is an opportunity for fascists.

LatteLazy2• 3 years ago

The British system (parliamentary sovereignty) means your rights are ONLY what the current government decides. There is no way to establish fundamental rights the way the US can with an Amendment. So any improvement you get post brexit is only worth a damn until the next change of whim of parliament.

Personally, I would take a guaranteed "90% right" system (aka the EU) over a random number generator (aka Brexit)...

DannyBee2• 3 years ago

"By people who aren’t listening to you."

This is the part everyone wants to say but isn't right. They are usually listening to people, just not people who agree with you :)

One of the grand follies is to assume politicians are not doing what their constituents support.

They almost always are, and often enjoy incredibly high local support/satisfaction ratings, even when the national ones are in the toilet.

They spend significant amounts of time polling and understanding how their constituents will react to issues and votes.

Now, you may want to argue those constituents are ignorant, or don't know what the vote really means, or whatever, but it's a sideshow.

I often see people say "well 70% of people in the country support X so politicians aren't listening". But when you break it down, they are usually voting in alignment with constituent support, and it's just a variant of Simpson's paradox in action (overall population vs subgroups).

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

Regional constituencies allow politicians to select the voters they want in many respects. The UK might look very different if they had a party list or some other form of PR.

jabradoodle• 3 years ago

Well, for example, our national politicans have delayed a plan to clean our waters (that are almost all polluted to a level illegal under EU law) until 2063. They are clearly not representing the people even on non partisan issues.

nancyhn• 3 years ago

You may be surprised by how this plays out. UK has a golden opportunity, as Paul Graham recently wrote:

I knew EU regulators would be freaking out about AI. I didn't anticipate that this freaking out would take the form of unbelievably stupid draft regulations, though in retrospect it's obvious. Regulators gonna regulate.

At this point if I were a European founder planning to do an AI startup, I might just pre-emptively move elsewhere. The chance that the EU will botch regulation is just too high. Even if they noticed and corrected the error (datum: cookie warnings), it would take years.

Now that I think about it, this could be a huge opportunity for the UK. If the UK avoided making the same mistakes, they could be a haven from EU AI regulations that was just a short flight away.

It would be fascinating if the most important thing about Brexit, historically, turned out to be its interaction with the AI revolution. But history often surprises you like that.

kwere• 3 years ago

Uk is not a powerhouse for anything outside finance, thinking they can start up a cluster in whatever sector from the city + Oxbridge is delusional

verisimi2• 3 years ago

Right. But I don't think the EU is better!

I mean, everytime I go to a new site, what cookies am I going to accept...? What ridiculous yet boring puzzle is going to try to trick me into giving this or that info over? Thanks EU!

RedNifre• 3 years ago

That's not EU, that's actually illegal under EU law. EU law requires that the "reject all" option is as easy to identify and click than the other ones.

lwhi• 3 years ago

Exactly.

The nice thing about being part of the EU was that we had a second level of sanity involved in our jurisdiction .. especially important when we have inept dangerous parties in control.

sfe22• 3 years ago

The good news is UK is democracy, so no need to worry.

pbhjpbhj5• 3 years ago

/s presumably.

We're so democratic we lock up people who look like they might be going to protest against us having rulers selected by accident of birth, rulers we are forced to spend £10s of £Millions 'celebrating' despite them being some of the richest people in the World. You can't get more democratic than that! Good job everyone here has more than enough, so it's not at all immoral. /s

rsynnott2• 3 years ago

Well, no, it doesn’t _have_ to. There’s little stopping the UK from holding onto what it has. Brexit provided an amount of political cover to remake the law if it _wanted_ to, though.

hkt3• 3 years ago

For the elites who backed it - as opposed to the people who voted for it - Brexit was always a project about Americanising the UK. They're the same people forcing mayors on us, the same ones who wanted chlorinated chicken, the same ones who think american style private health insurance is a good way to run a healthcare system, and all the rest.

So I'm not surprised that they think invasive surveillance capitalism is also a good thing.

charlieyu12• 3 years ago

I’m a Hongkonger. The only thing I know about UK before moving to there is the Queen, and Manchester United.

I’m curious of what British politics like in general. Like, I’m absolutely against invasive surveillance, but I associate it more with communist China and its authoritarian bullshit.

hkt3• 3 years ago

It is deeply authoritarian from Labour and the Conservatives. During the Troubles (eg, the Irish Republican Army bombing the UK and their opposite numbers in Northern Ireland doing the same) we practiced internment - eg mass incarceration without charge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Demetrius

We also routinely convicted people on flimsy charges, this being the most notorious case:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six

A notoriously brutal policing operation split along ethnic lines:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Ulster_Constabulary

Infiltration of various groups by police with the sole purpose of surveilling and disrupting their activities:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/15/undercover-p...

Mass surveillance by GCHQ as documented by Snowden:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

Rendition without trial (aka kidnapping) and torture:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/22/uk-support-cia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...

London is the most surveiled city outside China:

https://www.verdict.co.uk/most-surveilled-city/

And last but not least, the Metropolitan Police is full of creeps, rapists and murderers:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-58747614

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/28/met-police-p...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/apr/22/fourth-offic...

...

OK, one more, I give you.. indefinite prison sentences:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/sep/28/call-to-rese...

Edit: The pattern I'd identify throughout 200 years of our history is that we regularly "clamp down" on groups that are no threat (eg, Catholics, Irish people, and today Muslims) and radicals of any kind who wanted stuff like the vote, or socialised healthcare, or a decent environment. The pattern may well span longer, but I can definitely pick it up during that time.

I don't think it is even a matter of national character, either: it is a function of how our politics works. We have two viable parties of government, and they don't contest certain things, including authoritarian policymaking.

ThisIsNotNew2• 3 years ago

Funny you say that because I know someone who picked Manchester after moving to UK from HK because he and his dad support Manchester United. He moved along with his brother, sister and retired parents, all under the HK visa. They are looking to buy two homes in Manc with their in savings.

The newspapers are suggesting the new migrant stats to be published soon by Home Office for past 12 months will show extremely high numbers from both Hong Kong and Ukraine. To be honest I'm surprised people from Hong Kong didn't pick Australia instead of UK given it's better weather and bigger homes/roads compared to cramped England.

aftbit• 3 years ago

I want my own private live facial recognition in the form of a social secretary that reminds me the names of people that I have met before. That would be a killer app for AR for me.

malfist2• 3 years ago

Honestly, as a person with prosopagnosia, I would kill for a google glass style AR that could just tell me names after someone gets a haircut

canbus• 3 years ago

Roll on next GE.

bb123• 3 years ago

As if Auth-Left Labour wouldn't also love this.

nly2• 3 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure that Labour will win

the_mitsuhiko• 3 years ago

I have strong doubts that any company will care much about a British version of the GPDR. Even with the record fines, the GDPR is routinely disregarded. I can only assume that most companies will not care about applying special rules for the UK.

jacobp100• 3 years ago

I don’t really have a problem checking faces against a known police database - provided there’s good laws about how people end up on that list. But people not on that list should not be tracked

syngrog66• 3 years ago

The surveillance dystopia is a topic and minor theme running through a game I've been building. [SB: see below]

I believe we need to strengthen laws against it. As well as start practicing a broader set of personal security & privacy techniques.

For example, a few of the easy ones I apply by default: I try hard to never use someone else's WiFi: and pay cash everywhere I can; and when say a fast food place asks for my name, unnecessarily, I give them a throwaway alias name (like Joe or Bob), so at worst thats the name they enter in their system. Hundreds more techniques exist obviously, some much stronger, and I recommend folks tailor theirs to taste.

Trade-offs always, and no silver bullet. But wise to take SOME action to fight back and protect yourself. Don't be paranoid, but don't be a fool.

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[SB] - https://synystrongames.itch.io/slartboz

UK’s GDPR replacement could wipe out oversight of live facial recognition

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