Re:Surveillance society developing in Britain (Score 2)

Integrating face recognition software into this system will allow the police and their "friends" to automatically monitor your

movements in public, who you hang around with, what shops you use ect etc.

It would, if it worked that well. Reality though, is different from media hype. One day it may well be possible to monitor everybody on the street, but consider what you need to do this. Cameras need to be everywhere, they need to be all coneected up to a very very very powerfull computer capable of searching through everyones image to see if it matches. This computer must also be capable of extracting all the faces from all the video stream and continuosly tracking them. All this in the few seconds that you're actually in the frame. Oh and did I mention the picture quality these systems need is quite high, and cr+ppy pictures from CCTV are rarely good enough? Or that they don't work well in uncontrolled lighting? Or that you need up to data pictures of people to search against? Or that the systems tell you who looks like the image, but can't say that they are the same person....

Computers capable of all this just don't exist at the moment, and when they do, they'll be well out the price range of your local police

The success of the local council's trial in the UK is mainly due to puplicity driving the criminals away, rather than the technology. The computer output won't even be admissable in court.

I'm not worried....... imh