Where AI-powered surveillance and control technologies meet capitalism 101
A fresh expose by civil rights group Big Brother Watch has revealed that over the past two years eight train stations across the UK — including busy hubs such as London’s Euston and Waterloo, Manchester Piccadilly, and several smaller stations — have conducted facial and object recognition trials using AI surveillance technology. By rigging Amazon’s AI surveillance software to the stations’ CCTV cameras, the initiative was ostensibly meant to alert station staff to safety incidents and potentially reduce certain types of crime.
The data collected was sent to Amazon Rekognition, according to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request obtained by Big Brother Watch. As WIRED magazine reports, “the extensive trials, overseen by the government-owned rail infrastructure body Network Rail, have deployed object recognition — a type of machine learning that can identify items in videofeeds — to detect people trespassing on tracks, monitor and predict platform overcrowding, identify antisocial behaviour (“running, shouting, skateboarding, smoking”) and spot potential bike thieves.”
In other words, it was all intended to help keep rail passengers safe, train stations clean and tidy and bikes in their place. A Network Rail spokesperson said:
We take the security of the rail network extremely seriously and use a range of advanced technologies across our stations to protect passengers, our colleagues, and the railway infrastructure from crime and other threats.
When we deploy technology, we work with the police and security services to ensure that we’re taking proportionate action, and we always comply with the relevant legislation regarding the use of surveillance technologies.
That is probably not as comforting as it may sound. As I will show later in this article, the (almost certainly outgoing) Sunak government has tried everything it can to gut the limited safeguards protecting the British public from the potential downsides and dangers of AI-empowered surveillance.
Measuring Passenger “Satisfaction”
A particularly “concerning” aspect of the train station trials is their focus on “passenger demographics,” says Jake Hurfurt, the head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch. According to documents released in response to the FOIA request, the AI-powered system could use images from the cameras to produce “a statistical analysis of age range and male/female demographics,” and is also able to “analyse for emotions” such as “happy, sad and angry.”
This is where AI-powered surveillance and control technologies meet capitalism 101. From the WIRED article (emphasis my own):
The images were captured when people crossed a “virtual tripwire” near ticket barriers, and were sent to be analysed by Amazon’s Rekognition system, which allows face and object analysis. It could allow passenger “satisfaction” to be measured, the documents say, noting that “this data could be utilised to maximum advertising and retail revenue.”
The article offers no indication as to how that might be achieved, but the proposal itself should hardly come as a surprise. Besides serving as an instrument of government surveillance control, biometric systems will be used to maximise corporate revenues and profits — whether for the tech giants providing the hardware and software, in this case Amazon, the large financial institutions facilitating the transactions or the retail companies honing their targeted advertising techniques.
It brings to mind two scenes from the 2002 sci-fi movie (based loosely on a Philip K Dick short story), “Minority Report.” In the first, the camera takes a retina scan of the protagonist John A Anderton and a billboard calls out to him, “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now”? In the second, Anderton visits a mall where he is met by an attractive female hologram advising him what clothes to buy. Set in 2054, the film imagines that advertisers will be able to personalise messages on billboards or through holograms via retinal scans.
Apart from the occasional still-born attempt, this particular dystopian scenario is yet to creep into most of our lives, though the widespread use of augmented-reality “wearables” like Apple Vision Pro will certainly make it more possible. As the WIRED article notes, AI researchers have frequently warned that using face analysis technology “to detect emotions is ‘unreliable’ and some say the technology should be banned due to the difficulty of working out how someone may be feeling from audio or video.”
On the other side of the English channel the EU Parliament has voted for a broad ban on the use of Live Facial Recognition systems in public spaces, as too have some US cities. By contrast, as we reported in October last year, the UK government is escalating its deployment of the controversial surveillance technology.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the son-in-law of Indian tech billionaire N R Narayana Murthy, is determined to transform the UK into a world leader in AI governance. Said governance apparently involves gutting many of the limited safeguards protecting the public from the potential downsides and dangers of AI, of which there are many…
As we reported in early August, live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance, where people’s faces are biometrically scanned by cameras in real-time and checked against a database, is being used by an increasing number of UK retailers amid a sharp upsurge in shoplifting — with the blessing, of course, of the UK government. Police forces are also being urged to step up their use of LFR. The technology has also been deployed at the Coronation of King Charles III, sports events including Formula 1, and concerts, despite ongoing concerns about its accuracy as well as the huge ethical and privacy issues it raises.
In what is surely one of the most brazen and egregious examples of mission creep you’re likely to find, the government has also authorised the police to create a vast facial recognition database out of passport photos of people in the UK . The ultimate goal, it seems, is to get rid of passports altogether and replace them with facial recognition technology…
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Nick Corbishley 