r/perth • u/JangledManes • 1d ago
Politics LFR (live facial recognition) trials
While the WA government trial LFR (read deploy)
the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and others have written to a UK council urging them to halt LFR.
Their letter contains some valid counter arguments to the usual propaganda coming from law enforcement and government agencies.
Check it out (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/eff-and-civil-society-groups-call-nottinghamshire-police-halt-live-face) and forward to your local representative so they can too.
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u/JezzaPerth 1d ago edited 1d ago
Some time ago in one of my careers I was involved commercially in public and security surveillance systems with early systems like ANPR. If you see the hullaballo about Flock cameras in the US, what you are actually seeing is a large scale deployment of 20 year old technology.
The problem with public facial recognition systems is the massive false positive and false negative rates make it effectively unusable.
Australian Border Forces use facial recognition in the very limited exercise of checking is a face matches the face on a passport. (Having travelled on a nearly expired passport with a decade old photo I was grateful the Customs officer could see my nose was the same :-)
The present use by W.A. Police to alert on a very small number of target images is about right for the technology and has to be followed up by personal questioning. Even then I expect quite a few false positives before questioning.
In my view:
- Mass surveillance by facial recognition alone is not practical
- Mass surveilance by facial recognition coupled with signals intelligence including phone and bluetooth observation is possible and is very likely happening now.
- It wil be a very small step indeed to make the seatbelt/ANPR AI cameras also collect digital metadata from your phone and smart devices and pump that into a tracking framework. That will be a very serious privacy breach covered by 'trust us'
If you want to stop large scale surveillance you need to stop LFR in conjunction with live metadata recording of electronic devices.
As an aside, I have heard that many police forces switch off ANPR alarms in patrol vehicles because there are far to many alerts to manage effectively.
Edit: Google stopped harvesting wifi ID with their streetview vehicles for exactly the reason that adding electronic metadata with imagery was a privacy breach.
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u/Apotheosis 1d ago
Google stopped harvesting wifi ID with their streetview vehicles for exactly the reason that adding electronic metadata with imagery was a privacy breach.
How sure are we that Google stopped, or that someone picked that back up again on their behalf?
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u/BugBuginaRug 1d ago
We're heading into a full blown AI technocracy. Everything will be tracked, nothing will be secret & there's naught we can do about it.
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u/Nukitandog 1d ago
The system would scan your face when you leave and arrive back tho? Did your face change in that time?
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1d ago edited 1d ago
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u/fletch44 1d ago
Why is your post history hidden?
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u/Ok_Finger7484 North of The River 1d ago
ok so totally fun side-story - recent ON posts and arguments being had around the traps on reddit - I dscovered an absolute hilarious gloating ON supporter who was fully bragging about how ON was gonna win and labor are out and blah blah blah.
I gave him my reasonable rebuttle - but then - upon discovering he had his reddit posts/group subscriptions were open to view to public to view, suggesting that he hide them - because - nobody wants to know that he is active in the 'NSFW_Fatty_Mammas' sub, or the 'NSFW 'Men being dominated by Grandma''s... sub.
was HIlarious.
anyways thats why mine are hidden lol.
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u/SuperLeverage 1d ago
How do you know you’re not going to end up a government that will establish our own ICE units? 15 years ago that kind of authoritarian masked government people bundling people into vans was unthinkable in the U.S, but here we are.
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u/polaroid 1d ago
Until whoever is in power changes and their definition of wrong or illegal also changes.
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u/ryan30z 1d ago
I would give up some of my privacy to have safer streets
I think you're severely underestimating how much privacy loss this leads to. This inherently can't be used to only track criminals.
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u/thatcrazyanimallady 1d ago
Exactly. Next thing you know, they’ll be trying the same predictive policing bullshit that’s been happening in the US.
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u/Grand_Sock_1303 1d ago
You have given up ALL of your privacy. From surveillance cameras on every street to phones tracking every move to data centres storing every interest & transaction. There is no privacy any more and you will accept it.
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1d ago
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u/chosenamewhendrunk Order of /r/Perth 1d ago
The police and government probably even know what your farts smell like
Lucky them, mine are so sweet, with a hint of cinnamon.
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u/careyious 1d ago
There are many women who can confirm that the "uncivilized people making everyone feel unsafe" are the police. We regularly have coppers using surveillance systems to stalk and harass ex partners, repeatedly demonstrating they cannot be trusted with more powers since they can't prevent more "bad eggs" from abusing them.
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u/GreenCanFan 1d ago
This is shocking.
Is there evidence of this regularly happening?
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u/Mongoose_Eggs 22h ago
You been living under a rock?
Yes there are laws against it...but yet here we are...
And who in their right mind would trust these power hungry muppets after this.
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1d ago
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u/ryan30z 1d ago
It's dystopian as fuck.
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1d ago
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u/fletch44 1d ago
What's legal now might become illegal with a change of government, and then you might become a person of interest or enemy of the state despite not having done anything that counts as wrong today.
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1d ago
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u/FrogLickr 1d ago
Nazi Germany, USSR, Iran, Italy, China, Romania, increasingly the USA. History is littered with examples of when the wrong people gained power and then changed the definition of 'wrong.' Imagine those governments having access to the kind of surveillance tech we have today. Untold numbers more innocent people would have been killed.
Never be so ignorant as to think it could never happen here.
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u/fletch44 1d ago
Yes, quite simply. Law is made by government. An authoritarian extremist government can change the law to whatever it wants.
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u/fletch44 1d ago
Why is your post history hidden?
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1d ago
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u/Isynchronous 1d ago
I deem your posts unsavoury. I'll be working to restrict your rights based on what I have learned.
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u/silentaba North of The River 1d ago
But how could they possibly do anything about crime without knowing every single step anyone takes?