Oxford Street gets permanent facial recognition. The trial next door already ran.

The story

City mayor Sadiq Khan has indicated Oxford Street will be among six West End areas fitted with permanent live facial recognition cameras next year. Currently the technology is van-mounted and moved between locations. Metropolitan Police trials in Croydon saw crime fall ten per cent, with 173 arrests in six months and 14,000 fewer offences recorded in the year since cameras were introduced. Civil liberties group Liberty warned the technology "scans the faces of everyone who passes by, regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing." Sainsbury's recently suspended its own use of live facial recognition after wrongly accusing a customer of shoplifting.

The reframe

Nine days ago this publication covered Transport for London's facial recognition trial at Victoria, where 530,000 scans over six months produced no matches. The chapter's argument then was that an absence of matches is not evidence a system is failing, it is the ordinary output of scanning everyone in case the person it wants eventually walks through. Oxford Street is what that argument looks like once the trial period ends. The vans move on. The cameras stay.

Privacy does not disappear because every fact is exposed. It disappears because the connection between facts becomes easy.The Performance of Obedience, Ch. 17