Police Scanning Every Face At UK Download Festival 134
AmiMoJo writes: Leicestershire Police have announced that they will be scanning every face at the popular UK Download music festival. The announcement article on Police Oracle (paywalled) reads, "the strategically placed cameras will scan faces at the Download Festival site in Donington before comparing it with a database of custody images from across Europe." The stated goal is to catch mobile phone thieves. Last year only 91 of the 120,000 visitors to the festival were arrested, and it isn't clear if the data will be deleted once checked against the database.
The linked article provides at least one image of a costume that would probably trip up any facial recognition technology yet devised.
Why would the festival cooperate? (Score:4, Informative)
It is this callous disregard for privacy that screams for laws that clamp down on any organization, including the police, from being able to gather data. Quite simply I want a law that prevents any organization from gathering data that isn't crucial for the transaction and to not be able to share that data without a warrant. Thus I want this reaching the point where the power company can only gather the minimum amount of data to send me a bill and deliver my service. I don't even want them noting my gender. Then I pretty much want them not to be able to share that data with their own marketing department, let alone "trusted third parties".
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Except a) it's not their rules and b) this is to (ostensibly) flag up known criminals, not those who actually commit crimes at the festival. That you might have been done for nicking phones in the past does not equate you going to a music festival with the intent to continue to do so. But, hey, fuck you forever if you have a criminal record, right? Want a job? Fuck you. Want a loan? Fuck you. Want to go to a music festival? Definitely fuck you.
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If they only scanned the faces of known criminals, I might agree with you. But that's not even possible.
Public places typically offer the privacy of being a face in the crowd. Nobody there sees YOU, they see "some person" they don't know. Tomorrow they won't remember you at all. Now, tomorrow you'll be part of a police database and who knows what they might do with the data.
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ANPR in the UK works on a very heavily regulated target: UK vehicle licence plates. The size, font and spacing of the letters on these plates is legislated for, and non-standard plates are hunted down by the police.
By contrast, a human face is a very much more difficult target to recognise. Generally speaking, most systems up to now (notable examples being purported terrorist-spotting systems at airports) have suffered from such huge false positive rates that they were useless. I would strongly suspect that
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Look, we won't hire this guy because he is stupid enough to go to macdonalds every sunday, and eats discussing chink food; he is probably a criminal because he was in that communist party rally and in that BSDM event --- he is a fucking faggot that was in that Gay Prade parade.
If you don't get a job because you go to macdonalds, eat chinese food, are a member of a legal political party or are gay - there's something very wrong with the company you're applying to in the first place.
Besides, it's the police that have this information, it's not publicly available like posting on facebook that you smoke crack.
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Like, the company will actually TELL you the real reasons for not hiring you....some years ago I once caught the HRM of my company when a bit drunk and she admitted to me that she would never hire anyone with a tattoo....I was shocked beyond believe, because we are talking about cutting edge semiconductor company with more than 50% of the staff with MSc. and 30% with PhD.
The chance that you find any "normal" person in my company is close to zero...unless you go to the HR office, the finance or the administr
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Next ask, "who is manning the cameras", and expect them to be just as sketchy. Oh the cops? So you trust the police to loo
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I'd prefer to have cops at music festivals as otherwise the criminal element get a bit gung-ho with stealing tents and stabbing rival drug gangs etc.
I'd be more concerned abou
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I'd be more concerned about facial recognition used at a political rally rather than an innocent music festival as there's not much blackmail material therein.
I assume facial recognition is already used at most political rallies/demos as they tend to be in public.
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I'd be more concerned about facial recognition used at a political rally rather than an innocent music festival as there's not much blackmail material therein.
When you find me a form of music that doesn't have even the slightest political connotations, I've found the dullest music in existance.
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The article isn't about the cops looking for pickpockets working the crowd. They are using facial recognition to try to find people suspected of crimes.
Of course, it is likely they didn't bother going to their last known address....too much work.
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I *am* a known thief, you insensitive clod!
FUCK YOU
Want to go to a music festival where the police ingore the presence of known thieves? FUCK YOU
They have no choice! (Score:5, Informative)
The festival needs a license, the last labour government made it condition of the license that the police agree, so the police use it to add any arbitrary law to the agreement.
So here the police demanded mass surveillance as a condition of their approval and so the festival has no choice but to go along with it.
This is how the UK is, the police drive the democracy, its heavily over-policed, and if you try to tackle them, they send out PR people to talk trash on TV.
Re:They have no choice! (Score:5, Interesting)
Bingo. Whenever the police have to licence something, e.g. the sale of alcohol or an event, they tag on a load of extra conditions for their own benefit. You will probably find that the CCTV providing the images for facial recognition has been paid for by the festival organizers as part of the deal. Any shop or pub getting a licence these days will need to install CCTV and make it available to the police.
The police love this. It costs them nothing and they can claim that much of the machinery of their oppression is privately owned, and thus not a threat or controlled by the laws governing their behaviour.
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+5
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Mandatory (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's the license condition used to force bars to install CCTV:
http://londonist.com/2009/02/mandatory_cctv_cameras_in_pubs.php
Quite simply if you refuse, the police object to the license and the festival would not be permitted. The police drive the law, and they're above any niceties like citizens rights.
None of this has been agreed by Parliament, Police were given the right to object to festivals in cases of public danger or major crime, and they expanded that into "do as we say or we'll object and your f
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Quite simply I want a law that prevents any organization from gathering data...
Absolutely impossible to enforce. You can never know what is being collected and stored. It is easier to prove the existence of your favorite deity.
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Very funny. How do you expect to do that?
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Quite simply I want a law that prevents any organization from gathering data...
Absolutely impossible to enforce. You can never know what is being collected and stored. It is easier to prove the existence of your favorite deity.
It's a Comfort to me. Like a Big Brother watching over me wherever I go!
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Re:Why would the festival cooperate? (Score:4, Insightful)
Directly from their privacy policy on their website. [downloadfestival.co.uk]
Information on your preferences. We may collect information about events you like or products you buy or enquire about (e.g. as part of a survey or from your review of an event). We may also hold information on interests and demographic categories inferred from your interactions with us in order to provide you a better service and to provide you with more focused information. For example, if you buy tickets to a certain show and lots of people who went to that show also bought tickets for a different concert, we might send you information about that concert.
Cashless payment wristband usage information. If you use a cashless payment wristband during one of our events, we may collect information relating to your use of the wristband such as check-in information and the purchases you make with your cashless payment wristband (i.e. purchase of products and merchandises).
Understand that you are NOT the customer here. You're the product.
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Just because the customer purchases a product doesn't mean that he/she cannot simulatenously be a product. Which is manifestly what's going on here.
And they apparently did use "1984" as an instruction manual.
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You are the product, means that not only are these companies spying on you, they are proccessing information to sell to advertisers much in the way a spy agency would go after a mark. They find your psycological weak points to convince you that their product is awesome and then have you harrass the companies neigh sayers.
At the end of the day,
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If you don't do what the police ask you to, you will not be able to run your event, it's as simple as that. This is often a financial issue for example. :
http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/crime/100-fewer-police-at-hogmanay-over-funding-row-1-3597735
I could name several smaller independent festivals in the UK that have been made financially infeasible by large imposed policing costs and had to be subsequently cancelled. Many would argue that often the policing costs are un-warranted a
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its called download but thats just a name , it means nothing other than some marketing people though the target market would think it is cool
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If not, he's hilariously stupid.
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Thats litterally how pimps control prostitutes.
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How much financial damage can the police do through harrassment to ensure the cameras stay up, such as imposing fines, threatening to revoke permits, taking them through court systems, having uniformed and un-uniformed officers harrass festival goers until they don't want to come back or get them to leave before they spend too much money.
Waiting for a financial incentive to get large companies
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> How many people are going to stay home or spend less money because of the cameras?
The story indicates that this was going through on the quiet, which negated people's options to make an informed fucking decision.
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I prefer a nicely shaven... leg
Unfortunately commonplace security (Score:3, Interesting)
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Have you got a link to that, I hadn't heard shopping centres had started linking security camera footage to facebook accounts?
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Have you got a link to that, I hadn't heard shopping centres had started linking security camera footage to facebook accounts?
He wont because it is bullshit.
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Additionally, what do you think the so-called loyalty/advantage/discount cards are for? They are used to track your purchases and market at you.
The upshot is, once facial recognition comes to all of these stores, such tracking cards will become obsolete.
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As it is, receiving money off vouchers for things that I have bought recently does not exactly feel like I'm being watched by Big Brother.
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BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/busine... [bbc.com]
NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02... [nytimes.com]
Here is a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-walmart-write-rules-facial-recognition/245707/
There are others but these stitch together the use of facial recognition in existing retail security systems (2011) and the later meetings (Walmart, Facebook) to establish "rules of conduct" for retail implementation, a video showing how it's done. It's certainly proven to
trivial to circumvent (Score:3)
They're keeping it secret because its trivial to circumvent by wearing a hoody or a mask.
It seems very likely that the prevalence of CCTV has driven the trend over the last 15 years towards hoodies - i.e. jumpers with a hood that may conceal a lot of your face.
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...its trivial to circumvent by wearing a hoody or a mask.
Not at the gate. They can make you remove all disguises, dark glasses, etc and take a picture there.
Re: trivial to circumvent (Score:1)
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From the ticket:-
25. By attending the event, you give your express consent to your actual or simulated likeness to be included within any film, photograph, audio and/or audiovisual recording to be exploited in any and all media for any purpose at any time throughout the world. This includes filming by the police or security which may be carried out for the security of customers
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Expect hoodies, masks, or anything else like that to be completely illegal soon.
In fact, check your local bank. Mine already forbids wearing hats and sunglasses. Don't even think about wearing a mask in one.
Don't pretend for one second that rules like this won't slowly continue to expand elsewhere.
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justification? (Score:4, Interesting)
You'd think they would have to provide some sort of reason why this specific venue was chosen for this "dragnet" law enforcement. This isn't like license plate scanners where they're throwing them up all over the place on highways... this is a very specific deployment. If they're going to use the reason of "catching cell phone thieves" (which by itself seems to be a very trumped-up reason) you'd thing they would be expected to provide some justification, why they have any reasonable belief that any significant number of said theives are going to be there.
That reason could actually probably be dismantled now that they've announced they intend to BE there, any said thief would be very likely to avoid the venue as a result. So just based on that alone, they should be packing up?
It'd be like the police planning a raid on a local bar that had a track record of lots of underage drinkers. If news of the date/time of the raid gets out, it'd be pointless to go ahead as scheduled with the raid? If they went ahead with it even after being exposed, you'd have to assume that the "looking for undeage drinking" was just an excuse for the raid and there was some other specific reason that they didn't want to become public knowledge.
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This specific venue because this is the only major UK festival held in the Leicestershire Constabulary. Leicestershire police have been trialling face recognition software for over a year now - they are merely extending their coverage to include festival goers as well as their regular surveillance of the local residents.
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you can be everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
so a fun anecdote i heard from a friend who works in the biometrics field is that in testing facial recognition software that would track people on a college campus, they found a strange anomaly that there was one person that had been spotted hundreds of times in multiple locations at the same time. after reviewing the footage he realized that the cameras were actually finding bob marley's face on t-shirts.
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Ah hell, Bob Marley's nefarious evil plot is revealed, he's an unstoppable criminal now, he can do anything and yet he will have a complete alibi!
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just goes to prove: "the raster, man, is vibrating!"
can't get a steady signal with all that going on.
dear me, I have corrupted the Borg (Score:3)
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Fuck everything (Score:1)
Seems bizarre more than anything else (Score:1)
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Hahahahahahaha...
You're so cute when you're naive :D
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Since they're not, and it's only random comments that suggest they are, with nothing to back it up, I'm going to consider this conspiracy theorist nonsense for now.
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Not very easily. They're designed to prevent this. That's the whole point in having them rather than a laminated badge or something.
I wonder if they would arrest you for wearing this (Score:3, Insightful)
download is a shit festival (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been involved in quite a few uk festivals and know several organisers and IMNSHO opinion this could have been rejected by the organisers.
Download has a reputation in the festival scene for being one of the grimmest most corporate of festivals, think mainstream moshing meatheads on speed
and lager , not hugging hippies on ecstasy. Its quite likely the police strong armed download about this because of their target audience but its just as
likely download came up with this themselves to reduce policing bills. Having seen policing bills for other festivals its quite likely download were
hit with something in the order of millions and hired someone (lots of ex-coppers consult on this ) to analyse how to mitigate it and they came up with this.
Note the almost total lack of outcry from festival goers about this, downloaders just don't care, if this was tried with glastonbury there would be riots.
The RFID purchasing thing is way more dangerous in my opinion , this has been tried as several festivals and has resulted in a lot of festival
traders getting ripped off by organisers who simply loot their traders revenue if they fail to make enough money (which happens a lot because
festival running is subject to a bewildering array of regulations that don't make sense and cause unpredictable expenditure). People who work
at festivals know full well that accepting anything that isn't cash is a gamble on the skills of the organisers. It turns festival organisers into banks
which is a terrible idea.
the police strategy of applying more and more over the top requirements on festival organisers is driving festivals into smaller and smaller events,
this is typically because the explosion of festivals is a direct response to similar controlling behaviour regarding events and venues in cities. Its a dangerous game to play , over zealous legislation drives events underground where they are potentially less safe (although often much more sensible), where they generate no tax revenue and have no access to sensible venues. This also dramatically increases the possible harms of drug use , contributes to a lot of post drug use psychosis and creates a vast revenue for criminals.
Until the government and the police recognise and protect the right to have fun and gather socially as the vital part of our culture that it is we will continue to
have all manner of baffeling social problems as people do it anyway in less than safe circumstances.
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Hot item for sale. (Score:2)
India is the world leader in these stickers, from traditional simple red/maroon circles, to really fancy pieces that are almost jewelry [google.com]. They should be able to whip up a few million eyes, noses and lips in a jiffy.
Some more info (Score:2)
News item from Leicestershire Police :
https://www.leics.police.uk/news-appeals/news/2015/06/15/download-success-see-you-in-2016
Interestingly apparently a 0.2% false positive rate. On attendance size of 90,000 that's 180 people mis-identified. This is apparently using NEC's NeoFace Watch system which they started trialling in the middle of 2014.
http://www.necam.com/Docs/?id=c8a08fd5-e79c-4f00-9f37-9919318cc772
Crafty disguise (Score:2)
"The linked article provides at least one image of a costume that would probably trip up any facial recognition technology yet devised. "
Clark Kent's lenless glasses?
Really need more people in disguise if the scum are going to be pulling this constantly...
Dear Government (Score:4, Funny)
For FUCK sake LEAVE us ALONE. Your supposed to be the countries foundation, not our overloads - fuck off.
Is data deleted? NO!! (Score:2)
Solutions.... (Score:1)
Extra bright INFRARED BULBS (Score:1)
Music Download Festival! (Score:2)
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Maybe their paymasters thought it was a Music Download Festival and thought it'd be a good idea to have incriminating evidence complete with mugshots (nice for the world-wide facial recognition database) of the perpetrators of these heinous crimes against the hard-working, living-off-scraps music community.
joking aside some of the met really are that stupid
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Don't know about the Luton ones, but they are everywhere.
Leeds rail station has cameras placed for face reco all over the place, particularly on the stairs. I imagine most of the UK transport hubs now have this.
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Yes, they are: https://www.hrsid.com/product-... [hrsid.com]
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Wow, that's pretty devious/clever. The lights don't do anything except get you to look at the camera.
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More to the point would be to compare this to the number of arrests for similar events with less intrusive measures.