<i>Sure the West and China are both turning into biometric dystopias buuuuuuuut ours delivers fried chicken to your train seat.</i> - Naomi Wu, Shenzhen.<p>For some railroad lines in China, you can order food while on a train and have it delivered to you at a station. That requires finding the passenger quickly, so some combination of cell phone tracking and face recognition is used.[1] KFC is using this system.<p>China's approach to Big Brother is more like a service function. The Government knows who you are and what you're doing, but China has been like that for centuries. There's no tradition of anonymity. The older paper-based systems worked when people didn't move much. The newer technology is being used to provide routine services, such as convenience store checkout and finding purse snatchers.<p>London has a lot of cameras, but many of them are old, so they have poor resolution. Newer 4K surveillance cameras [2] finally have enough resolution to be useful for recognizing faces at 40 feet or so.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-07/13/content_30092586.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-07/13/content_300925...</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.lorextechnology.com/articles/What-is-4k-Video/R-sc16000060" rel="nofollow">https://www.lorextechnology.com/articles/What-is-4k-Video/R-...</a>
Briton are 95% comfortable with massive surveillance. The "average Joe" has the "I got nothing to hide" and that "go get them paedophiles", which are very true statements.<p>We are talking about a nation that has 4,200,000 [1] cameras surveilling them and nobody bats an eye about this. For some reason, Britons have decided (or was forced to them and they didn't push back) that privacy is not necessary, so, let them have it.<p>What harm can 3 more cameras can do? :) (per kiosk, per street)<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_Kingdom" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...</a>
There is something very important in working out our tolerance to surveillance vs the utility that is absolutely impossible to get without risking surveillance.<p>I can't really articulate it yet, but reading this article it occurs to me how really the old phone system didn't offer much more in the way of privacy (every phone call was recorded), but it offered more in the way of obscurity. Now that our information systems and techniques are good enough that obscurity is increasingly becoming unreachable (even by design), we need to come to terms with what that really means.<p>It feels like a big loss, but every time I sit down to analyze what we've really lost, I never can identify anything actually valuable to me in contrast to the privacy rights that we already struggle to maintain.<p>But also, a consequence of a networked society is that people can cooperate to create systems that have remarkably disproportionate collecting capacity. In the same sense that the consequence of an industrialized society is that people can cooperate to create disproportionate manufacturing capacity. No amount of rules, conservative independence, liberal appeal, or public outcry can change that fundamental truth. Nor can we undo the march of technology without a fundamentally cataclysmic restructuring of the world's economy.
I don't know if these phone boxes will last for long, there have been plenty of efforts to repurpose them for free wifi, maps, local council services and so on but these experiments never last for that long.<p>The fundamental problem is the guy with the iPhone X has a contract for lots of 4G bandwidth and would prefer to just use that except for at home/work when the wifi gets used.<p>So you are left with customers for the service that have pay as you go SIM only contracts for an old iPhone 4S.
Mac address randomization is a must if your wifi is on in public (you don't even need to connect anywhere to be fingerprinted and tracked). Also use cookie self-destruct plugins for your browser.
Ah yet another attempt to keep the payphones division alive whilst I can feel sympathy for those stuck in payphones as a share holder of BT.A I do ask is this actually going to turn a profit.
This level of surveillance is a shame given that by luck of never being invaded by the Nazis there's no ID cards in the UK. Somehow also people managed to stop attempts to get ID cards introduced.<p>It might even be because of this. That is, it's easy for other European governments to track people as they have to carry ID at all times. Because the UK government are worried about the lack of this, they go down the CCTV route.
I was wondering why they don't use old style phone boxes with new tech inside. But of course, someone will piss, take a shit or do drugs inside. Great way to ruin it guys.