This is the dystopian future that civil-liberty campaigners are most afraid of - a China-style mass-surveillance state.
This is so rich coming from the UK, the most CCTVed country in the world. Oh no, if we keep doing this insane-o shit we'll become almost as bad as the image we made up about bad country Jyna.
For context, Chinese cops are unarmed. This is fine because people in China don't have guns.
As a tangent, I got reminded of someone saying that the presence of 50 000 guns in China proves that gun control always fails, completely ignoring the fact that China has a population of 1 400 000 000. That is a rate of 0.000036 guns per person. In comparison, the USA has more guns than people.
Most cops are unarmed in the UK. There's just a detachment of armed ones in the busiest hubs in central London, closer to the queen and houses of parliament and all that.
As someone said, London Metropolitan Police (responsible for the 32 boroughs) is unarmed, but within London there's 'City of London Police' for that specific area. They're the guns.
I've seen more armed military on a single day in Tian'anmen square that in a cumulated 10 days in London, I know hexbear is supposed to be satire but give me a break.
This is the kind of thing where I want a single failure to mean a ban on that company ever doing anything similar again
Oh, you got one person’s face wrong one single time? Sucks to suck. No more facial recognition for you. In fact, no more security cameras at all, no loss prevention staff, you’re literally not allowed to take any steps to prevent theft anymore because you’ve proven you can’t be trusted with that power.
To elaborate: if the store does not require any sort of membership or rule to use (e.g. not a Costco or Sam’s Club), no one has the authority to stop you or search you. You can ignore them and just walk out. But if they ask you to leave, you do have to leave or else it’s trespassing, but they must warn you and give you the opportunity to leave first.
Also, if you do give consent to be searched or detained by security/staff, then basically you lose most of your defenses. They can do whatever they want to a “reasonable” degree, e.g. rummage through your shit, dump it all out, take pictures, make you wait for cops, etc.
I usually just flash my receipt to the old lady when I leave and they wave me through. But if there’s a long line I’m just going to cut everyone and leave lol.
The tech might not be perfect yet but with some improvement I'm sure they can get it to 40/40 false positives and keep every customer out of stores making retail almost bearable to work in.