This is great! When the system IDs someone, you know they're not the person you're looking for. It's a great way to weed out potential suspects.
The real purpose of this isn't to be accurate. The reasons are likely to make Londoners accustomed to even more surveillance and/or to give them some "legitimate" reason they can appeal to when they want to persecute someone for less glamorous reasons like ethnicity or economic status.
I can't understand why would citizens of a country not accept a national ID system like every other country, but they're fine with CCTV and this.
This is great news - an expensive and highly publicized failure of FR means it will be a long time before other municipalities start looking to "invest" in it.
Prior work by the Met includes the "ring of steel" anti-terrorist surveillance zone, and the whole dodgy business of "super-recognisers" as well as the use of face recognition on crowds of protestors.
The police are very nice people assisting in the theft of peoples facial profiles. They work for a little bit of money, take on a bit of angry response and sniggers from passers ny, and hand over the data to private industry, with free pass from government to bill the tax payer billions, since the data, well, you know, needs to be kept secure. Police officer gets there weekly wage, a bit of fun beating up a few who disagree, and private security contractor makes all the money. I here them laughing now, “yeah, we monetise loads of innocent peoples face profiles, they think its to save them from terrorists lol, the police stole it for us, lol”
They forgot to put a known elephant in Cairo.<p>They should probably use a well-known public figure, such as the prime minister--someone whose movements can also be partially verified against public calendars--to verify that the system is working. Or just hire someone to walk a known path through camera FOVs regularly, using varying efforts to disguise appearance and at different times of day.