It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state.
Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught).
I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it.
The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules.
The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work.
IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way.
Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.
The UK has been a surveillance state for a long time.
I've been the victim of property crime 4x in the UK, and 3 of those times the entire thing was caught on multiple CCTVs. But that didn't help me get my stuff back or prosecute criminals. The one time I did get my computer back was when the police raided a stash house (due to an anonymous tip, not surveillance) and found a treasure trove of stolen electronics, which included my computer.
But having cameras everywhere in London didn't help at all, so AFAICT they only exist to surveil you.
Is there a public conversation in European countries about the value of liberty? I don't mean arguments about how liberty can lead to more economic prosperity, I mean how liberty is valuable on its own terms.
Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move.
How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
The couple of times I’ve even done as little as fly through Heathrow it has been apparent to me that the UK is on its way to becoming an unfettered surveillance state, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
Sao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff
[0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)
As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.
The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.
The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.
There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
> Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology.
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
You need photo ID to verify your age to access "adult content" (which definition is ever-expanding outside the boundaries of smut) and now police begin using this new pool of facial data to surveil the public en masse.
They didn't even wait half a year to show their hand. That's how confident they are.
Isn't UK a democracy? Why then have the people not rejected the initiative? Ah, right - they haven't even been asked.
It's also now the law to remove a face covering when requested by the police (it's supposed to be under certain conditions, but have fun arguing that with a jake). Actually love living in a police state. At least we repealed the law making cable ties illegal I guess.
I'm so embarrassed to be British these days. We're a small island of small minded people.
Who needs the vans when one has Tesla's roaming the streets and parked in random places? Those things have a myriad of cameras. What stops Telsa from providing access to (insert highest paying agencies and/or companies)? Surely by now some other modern cars have followed this pattern. There's even a camera pointed at the drivers face. It's only a matter of time before they have fast uplinks to Starlink. I have to assume the car could do some local AI to minimize uploading noise and only upload the interesting bits.
telsa> give me the location and names of everyone currently picking their nose, lol.This is the same country that couldn’t introduce driver’s licences with pictures for privacy and surveillance for years. What happened?
This would lead to a rise in doctors and accountants wearing the combo of Canada goose jacket, balaclava and man-sling-bag in summer.
Related: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/uk_expands_police_fac...
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887373, but we merged that thread hither)
Brass eye came true! What is this for? Laser audio mics into the bedrooms of suspected anime forum members?
Never been a better time than now to engage yourself politically.
Doesn't the UK have cameras everywhere doing this anyways?
The UK is broke but has infinite money for a surveillance state.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
We are going to be hearing that argument a lot as the AI police state evolves
If it's used to track folks out on bail or already convicted of violent crimes then great. However seeing what the UK police are like right now it's likely to be applied to harass genteel retirees protesting about Israeli barbarity in Palestine.
I suppose it beats mobile xray vans.
Or, I've always had trouble looking on the bright side.
1. https://www.rapiscan-ase.com/products/mobile/zbv-cargo-and-v...
2. https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/technologies/z_backscatte...
We shall have to adopt a new fashion for Australian style cork hats:
So when China did this, this was criticised.
When the UK do it...
Double standards are wonderful.
> The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias.
I feel so much better! /sarcasm
How tone deaf can they be?
Whenever there are serious privacy concerns about how this sort of technology, you have a statement like attached. It doesn't address what people are worried about. They never directly address it.
Either the England is a shithole overrun with crime, or English elites are paranoid. Locals can tell me which one it is.
They seem to be doing everything except actual policing.
Mobile facial recognition systems suffer from significantly reduced accuracy compared to fixed installations due to variable lighting, angles, vibration, and lower-quality optics - making these vans likely less effective than the existing CCTV network.
Who is pushing this within the UK- government aside? I want some avenues of search that help me make sense of where the world is heading. Thanks.
Can email my proton proxy in my profile if you want to be discreet. I have a whole life ahead of me and need to know how to prepare.
Suitably organised protest folks need to roll out anti facial recognition tools. Maybe even turn facial coverings into a source of revenue.
One tool would be methods to blind said facial recognition vans. Cameras are relatively easily "blinded".
I wonder if they left the EU so they could monitor and restrict their citizens even more effectively and quickly. Just like limiting the length of knives this will definitely not solve their crime problem.
I’ve always wanted to visit the UK but it really sounds like a shithole now where you will be treated as guilty just for existing in public and your every move will be monitored at all times.
Whenever a brutal regime rise again, it will thrive due to the amount of work being done on surveillance tech.
Can you imagine Adolf (DE), Benito (IT), and Joseph (RU) with access to the same surveillance tech?
You can get a feeling of the scope of the crisis to come, on just how much government is ready to clamp down and trying to preserve "civilization" through surveillance. Even if western liberal society vanishing in the process makes that protection measure in relation to the protection goal is dizzying.
And encoded in all that ruckus is a uncomfortable truth! This is as far as we will go! There is no miracle tech on the horizon, that can be handed out to the masses, bribing all of us with a 60s like surplus to be peaceful. Instead its panopticon or bust!
From a lot of different angles, the UK is going full dystopia: privacy, civil rights, economy, demography
time to vote with your feet people.
The moment the Brexit referendum results were in I knew exactly where this will lead... I wish I was wrong.
What is the point if there are people on many streets with CCTVs doing drugs openly. I saw a cop simply walk by someone overdosing. Nothing will happen.
Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?
(Again, what is the point of the down-vote? I am asking for people's thought and opinions in the hope of a fruitful conversation).
Why do people need to be surveilled in the first place? Is Britain so full of offenders?
10 vans works out at one for every 10,000 square miles. Hardly a "roll out across the UK".
I would honestly start looking to flee the UK.
Well, that's some distopean shit right there ain't it
Orwell was way too kind.
The UK is almost lost.
The Khans are relentless on making Briton islamic as fast as they possibly can aren't they
This might be a hot take, but watching countries from pointing fingers and lecturing others about democracy to adopting the same tactics and use the cutting edge technology they have rambled about is both interesting and sobering.
We're all human, we're all the same.
It’s very sad how quickly their culture is devolving. I was in the UK last year and I probably won’t be back.
The weirdest thing to me was that all the news stations covered US politics extensively, but said little about domestic politics. Not sure what to make of that.
There is no expectation of privacy in public and there never has been.
Honestly I wouldn’t mind it if the police actually did anything. The UK has American style public services with European tax rates. They have Chinese style surveillance and thought control with LATAM levels of criminality.
They constantly seem to implement the worst of all possible solutions.
Facial recognition vans sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi indie game that’s intentionally trying to be funny/absurd.
They should have stayed in the EU.
Its all very dystopian.
People say we need to fight back against this but realistically how?
i mean, they do fuck all anyway so its a moot point
Fuck the UK Government. Do something.
HN title is wrong - the article title says "...across police forces in England".
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In itself this is a storm in a teacup.
The important question, only important question IMHO, is how they handle positives. Do they go all guns blazing and arrest the person on the spot? Or do they use a restrained approach and first nicely ask the person if they have any ID, etc? That's the important bit.
The UK ran out of colonies to oppress so they turned on their own people.
Sort of silly to talk about this when everyone is holding a facing-them network camera in front of themselves much of every day.
The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?