Live facial recognition cameras may become 'commonplace' as police use soars
51 comments
·May 24, 2025beloch
matthewdgreen
I think we need to understand and accept that this stuff is inevitable as the technology gets cheaper. If the cops don’t do it themselves, private industry will do it for them and sell it or hand the data over as a “public service.” The only way out of this is to make an affirmative series of laws that make the construction of anything resembling a tracking database illegal and heavily-fined, but we’re not there. Even privacy-friendly Europe isn’t close to putting those restrictions on its police.
dylan604
No private industry will do anything without it being profitable. Handing it over as a public service would mean they are making money with that data in other ways. What would be those other ways? I can't think of anything that's not dystopian hell, so maybe to make that not legal???
matthewdgreen
The answer is that these databases are hugely valuable for targeted advertising and marketing, and if they’re relatively cheap to build then that makes everything even easier. Law enforcement gets access because in most countries the law allows them to make data requests to existing companies, and “we aren’t going to help the cops solve a murder” is bad PR when you’ve already collected the relevant data.
BirAdam
Sufficient tax breaks would likely do it.
bbarnett
This has already happened, and the police and others pay for access.
cluckindan
> private industry will do it for them and sell it
This is already how it works in many cities.
causality0
One of the inevitable consequences of the legal conceit that images belong to the person who owns the camera, not the person who owns the face.
masfuerte
A similar thing happened with automatic number place recognition. With no public debate the police built a nationwide network of ANPR cameras. The Information Commissioner opined that it was probably illegal. But rather than recommending prosecutions, he recommended that the law be changed to legitimise the police law breaking.
2OEH8eoCRo0
How are you harmed by it?
matthewdgreen
The neat thing about these databases is that you’ll never know. Can a lender buy access to them? How about your abusive ex, who knows and/or is a cop? The stalker who somehow knew just where that woman would be when he killed her, was that just bad luck or did he slip someone a few hundred bucks or buy the data from a data broker?
There’s a version of an answer to this where access to search these systems is so tightly logged that we never need to wonder about the answer to these questions. I doubt most of the systems being deployed worldwide are anywhere near that standard.
lm28469
Religious registries were a harmless little census thing in Germany... well until 1933 at least. Once the system is in place and the data collected you need very strong institutions to protect the people
The 23 and me fuck up is also a good example, data is forever, laws and morales are very temporary
dghlsakjg
I don’t know for sure since we don’t know who has access to that data, but if I were an auto insurance company, I would love to know which of my customers tend to go out in inclement weather, or after midnight when the roads are statistically more dangerous.
Took me less than a minute to think of that example. I’m sure there’s more ways that information could be used against my interests.
caditinpiscinam
Cities are banning face coverings too.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-ski-mask-ban-bala...
At this rate they should just make everyone wear a big QR code containing our names and social security numbers on our shirts. A sort of license plate for people. Would save on processing power at least.
smcin
The US's first "Cop City", the $117m Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, officially opened April 29, 2025, despite years of opposition and a suppressed effort to get a referendum against it on the ballot. [0] Did not get any discussion here on HN at all. [1] characterizes it as "a massive, militarized police training compound in the Weelaunee Forest in the southeast outskirts of Atlanta" and lists its security partners as Flock Safety (automated license plate reader (ALPR) vendor, #58 fastest-growing company) and Motorola Solutions. [1] lists its Corporate and Nonprofit Foundation Donors and Sponsors: finance, real-estate companies, Acuity Brands, AT&T, Cushman & Wakefield, KPMG, McKesson, Invesco, Rollins, Synovus and others, Arthur Blank Foundation, The Bierenbaum Family Foundation, Connolly Family Foundation, The Goizueta Foundation, of Atlanta, Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, of Atlanta, O. Wayne Rollins Foundation, of Atlanta, J. Bulow Campbell Foundation and others.
(FYI the parent Guardian article is about England and Wales, not the US. There is a similar level of surveillance cameras but comparing use of force to the US, police in England and Wales only fatally shot 2 people in 2023/24 [2], 24 deaths in or following police custody and a further 60 fatalities defined as other deaths during or following police contact. for which [2b] is a report with demographics.)
[0]: "Atlanta’s controversial ‘Cop City’ training center opens after years of fighting" https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/at...
[1]: "The Companies and Foundations behind Cop City" https://afsc.org/companies-and-foundations-behind-cop-city
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/319287/deaths-during-or-...
[2b]: https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/our-work/research-and-stati...
octo888
This will achieve 3 things:
1. No reduction in crime
2. A huge chilling effect on the innocent population, further subduing people and paving the way for more authoritarianism.
3. Large amounts of profit for a private company
kwertyoowiyop
This will make murder mystery shows harder to write. Even now they usually put in some line about how they don’t have traffic camera coverage in the critical area, and they ignore getting location data from suspects’ phones.
cortesoft
I have always thought that futuristic police state movies and shows underestimate how oppressive a fully capable, automated surveillance apparatus could be.
Movies like Minority Report try to show the surveillance state as being a struggle to overcome, but it is still always too easy. Computers don’t get distracted, scale perfectly, and can run 24-7. You can’t just sneak away with your head down, because the machines would have tracked you into a place, would know exactly who is in every building, and would be able to associate the person exiting a building with the person who went in. They wont forget.
matthewdgreen
Look at how quickly the cops tracked Luigi Mangione. It’s not clear how much face recognition (as opposed to manual search) contributed to that, but even for a person who wore a mask, all it took was a slip up where he took the mask off in one place.
I am not saying this is a bad thing in the case of a pre-planned murder. But it does make it obvious how hard it might be to evade notice in the future, assuming you are doing it for more legitimate privacy reasons.
dylan604
If you go into a building and change clothes, they will not remember. Of course, we're assuming that the place you went into does not have cameras accessible to the system. At some point, building codes/permits will start requiring cameras specifically to feed into this system.
giantg2
Changing clothes does nothing against gait recognition.
tough
AI generated deepfakes solve this you can't trust the cameras footage now
null
Buttons840
Technology seems destined to bring everything to light. My only wish is that those in positions of power are the first to be dragged into the light.
0_____0
Public facial recognition and ALPRS database. It would be chaos.
ivape
So, are you thinking what I'm thinking? Bodycams on congressmen/women and senators? If you're on the job, the bodycam stays on.
amelius
What is this slippery stuff on this slope?
lenerdenator
Tyranny can always come. All you can do is be ready for it to come to you.
Oarch
Will they ban all types of face coverings? I couldn't imagine this happening in the UK, it's too culturally sensitive.
In which case, what good does it do?
n8cpdx
Plenty of criminals don’t bother covering their faces. Even when they plan their crime in advance and know there are cameras.
titzer
Yes, except "law" enforcement. In scare quotes because there will be no law.
FredPret
What about gait recognition
tough
[flagged]
vladms
Let's not ignore though that there are some people with some control. These systems do not appear because of a small conspiracy but because a lot of people think they are OK and don't bother to understand the issues and organize to fight them.
I know an ex-policemen that is a good man but hated working in the police because the "public" was aggressive and were challenging them constantly (would not name the country or specific stories). From their point of view "automatization" would make police job safer and easier, and convincing them of the contrary has few chances.
The more "not-connected" is the society (with people not having a friend that is "a policeman", "a firefighter", "a teacher", etc), the more problems we will have no matter the technology...
freeone3000
Why would I want to be friends with someone who murders with impunity? Who considers “the public” someone to control? Who considers themselves above question?
blooalien
> Why would I want to be friends with someone who murders with impunity? Who considers “the public” someone to control? Who considers themselves above question?
Because they're not all that way, and some of them still do genuinely try to "Protect and Serve"? And then you have the others mentioned "fire fighters", "teachers", etc, again many of whom are just tryin' to do some good in the world. Hunt all those good ones down and hold them up as examples of how the rest should be trying to do their jobs. Just complaining about the bad ones and acting like they're the only ones certainly doesn't make the situation any better for them or us.
We may need laws that treat these cameras as something like a wiretap. They can be there streaming their data to data stores, but accessing that data would require warrants that are limited in scope. The data could be used for answering specific, legally justifiable questions, not for everyday surveillance and profiling.
e.g. It would be valid to use these cameras to answer who was at a crime scene, when, and where did they go that day. It would not be valid to reconstruct a web of everyday associations stretching back months for someone just because an officer didn't like the way they look.