LUCY MANGAN: If I wanted cops spying on my face, I’d go and live in China
Here’s an idea. Why don’t we all save time and declare ourselves guilty at the age of 18 and sign a State Culpability document. Such is my response to the deeply worrying news that the Metropolitan Police is adding facial recognition cameras to its already plentiful armoury of surveillance weaponry.
Linked to databases on criminal suspects, the cameras will scan the features of people on the streets of London and alert officers if a suspect’s face appears. The Met claims any images of individuals not on their system will be ‘deleted in seconds’. How reassuring.
But during two years of trials, the system has been only 70 per cent effective at spotting suspects. No wonder the scheme – similar to one already used in South Wales – has been condemned as a ‘breathtaking assault on rights’. Of course, at a time of record numbers of knife attacks, there will be many who cleave to the ‘if you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve nothing to worry about’ school of thought.
But the problem with any kind of official surveillance is mission creep. We’re used to CCTV cameras – in London there are estimated to be 500,000 – but facial recognition cameras smack of authoritarian governments
But the problem with any kind of official surveillance is mission creep. We’re used to CCTV cameras – in London there are estimated to be 500,000 – but facial recognition cameras smack of authoritarian governments.
In China, such technology is used alongside an insidious system of judging people’s credit rating not just by how much they earn, spend and save but how they behave and with whom they associate.
But we’re not China, you exclaim! True – but governments change. And it is an axiom of life that politicians very rarely row back on any instruments of power they’ve given themselves. Insurance companies will also be eager to exploit this development. Employers would find it handy for recruitment vetting.
No one voted or asked for this but I can see countless companies joining in this most unBritish facial recognition bonanza. Away from the issue of whether we’re comfortable to be a society where cameras help anyone in a position of authority to identify us without our knowledge as we go about our daily lives, there is another disturbing aspect.
Research has shown that one in ten women has been voyeuristically surveilled by those monitoring CCTV cameras. Police officers have used such technology to track estranged spouses, ‘help’ their friends in various ways, and so on.
Most worrying, though, is what happens when everything is accessible to the authorities. What if your aunt attended an anti-Brexit rally, you live next door to a convicted drink-driver or last went on holiday to Moscow – and are thus tainted by association?
This isn’t scaremongering. The technology to eradicate our privacy already exists – but the laws, checks and balances (among which I include the lack of public awareness of its implications) sadly do not.
Big Brother won’t just be watching us, he’ll be reading our text messages, denying us insurance and selling every detail of our lives to anyone who’s paid their access fee.
Get ready to sign your guilty papers. Soon you won’t have a choice.
A friend has just spent £2,000 on… a chest of drawers. I suddenly feel I never knew her properly. It’s not just the amount of money. I could be a multi-billionaire and still be constitutionally incapable of spending £2,000 on a chest of drawers.
A cruel take on progress
BBC Radio DJ Liz Kershaw has been rebuked for criticising the announcement that all state schools and colleges will provide free sanitary products for pupils.
This long overdue decision followed sustained campaigning to end so-called ‘period poverty’, with claims that many girls can’t afford tampons and have to miss school.
Kershaw said: ‘Sorry if this is gross. But period poverty FFS?! My mum had to use old rags which my grandma boiled-washed and she re-used. How did she ever manage to get a scholarship to grammar school, go to university and become a headteacher without free tampons?’
BBC Radio DJ Liz Kershaw has been rebuked for criticising the announcement that all state schools and colleges will provide free sanitary products for pupils
The Radio 6 Music presenter is 61 and her mum used rags because, back then, everyone did, rich or poor. Mass-market products hadn’t been invented. In any case, just because her mother suffered, it’s crass to say today’s generation must suffer, too. My mother had TB. If I ever contract the disease, should I only be given treatments available in 1964?
It’s a crabbed and cruel mind that rejects progress.
A standard no girl should aim for…
Praise to Taylor Swift, left, for talking openly about her eating disorder. In a new TV documentary, the singer tells how she battled with her body as a teenager because ‘there’s always some standard of beauty you’re not meeting’. Let’s hope the millions of young girls to whom she is held up as that ‘standard’ heed her words and understand the unhealthy ideal of self-image they are fed.
Praise to Taylor Swift, left, for talking openly about her eating disorder
It WAS National Compliment Day on Friday. Somehow, I missed it. Surely not because I spent the day snarling at any family members who dared come near my desk?
Consistency is a much under-rated virtue. I admire anyone who gives out the sense that if you chopped them down the middle, they would be exactly the same all the way through. A glorious example is actor Brian Blessed. He’s been Brian Blessed-ing for 83 years. In an interview, the star says he couldn’t be happier. ‘I love myself!’ he boomed. ‘I can’t wait to wake up in the morning and be me! I look in the bathroom mirror and I’m a cross between a yeti and a gorilla. But I love it!’
If only we could harness this Blessed energy for the national good.
The Church of England has advised that sex should take place only between married, heterosexual couples.
Wait, you mean there’s yet another thing to add to the ‘to-do’ list? Can’t we just continue living vicariously through single friends of all persuasions and feeling quietly glad that others still have the energy to bother?
The Chelsea Flower Show this year is to display a garden based on female genitalia. Called, euphemistically, A Lady Garden, the design by Jennifer Hirsch will ‘echo the curves of the female form’.
I’m a feminist through and through, but I’m happy to let Chelsea stay a place where flowers are just flowers. They’re a miracle enough.
Jack’s Law, entitling parents who lose a child to take two weeks’ statutory paid leave to help cope with their bereavement, comes into force in April. It’s named after Lucy Herd’s one-year-old son Jack, who drowned in a pond.
Her husband was allowed only three days off work, one of which had to be for the funeral. Lucy has campaigned to change the law ever since. It never ceases to fill me with awe the way some people make life better for others even in the midst of the greatest imaginable suffering.
For congenital pessimists such as me, the coronavirus threat provides a twisted kind of relief. We always knew something like this would happen.
We’ve lived in anxious anticipation. Now it’s here, we can relax. Of course we’re not happy with the idea of an apocalyptic pandemic – we’re as scared as anyone – but there is a strange underlying peace in having one’s world view finally confirmed.
Lasagne à la loon
Hotels heiress Paris Hilton is back and this time she’s making lasagne. Sort of. A 15-minute YouTube video, Cooking With Paris, shows her attempting to assemble this basic dish with much the same degree of confidence and ability that you or I would have assembling a nuclear missile.
Baffled by kitchen utensils (‘Spoons are brutal!’). Confused by pasta that needs boiling. She wets kitchen roll with bottled water and wastes an entire block of cheese lest she hurts herself with the grater.
It’s impossible to tell if she is a self-aware comic genius or an absolute loon who shouldn’t be allowed out of the house without supervision. I look forward to finding out – though not to being invited for dinner.
Hotels heiress Paris Hilton is back and this time she’s making lasagne
Many years ago, I had to ask bestselling authors about their experience of the Hay Festival. The only one who put this fledgling reporter at ease was Monty Python’s Terry Jones, who died last week aged 77.
He twinkled, chatted, made jokes and gave me endlessly quotable lines. I was so grateful. A gentleman. RIP.
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