59
Facial recognition technology not about ‘total surveillance society’ – minister
(www.standard.co.uk)
Imagine if China did this
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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[removed by mod]
China has massively increased laws specifically to prevent it. Premises require explicit and direct permission from an individual in order to use facial recognition, facing steam criminal fines for non compliance. This came into effect on June 1st of this year.
The UK (i live here) is a mass surveillance hellscape.
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Bypassing paywalls needs to be a basic skill you know how to do in the year of our internet 2025.
I don't know why you think the laws magically don't also apply to the government itself. If your take is going to always be "yeah but the evil communists aren't going to be applying that to their own government" then there is literally never going to be any convincing you of anything being better in China, ever, because your baseline is always going to be disbelief.
but as far as I know from others there's more surveillance in China than the UK.
The fuck are you on about mate? The UK is the surveillance capital of the world. China is absolutely fucking better than us in this regard. They have consistently tightened privacy laws of late, beginning with PIPL in 2021 which is as strong if not stronger than the EU's GDPR law because it does not provide a "legitimate interest" processing scope and they have been increasing privacy with the new tighter laws this year.
They are absolutely better than the US and UK in this regard, and because the EU is bureaucratically slow China is now pulling ahead in privacy laws. Some of the new EU laws currently under consideration are looking towards China's implementation because they are becoming first to implement and thus leading other countries on implementation.
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Is the mass surveillance in the room with us right now?
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Mate you are not being coherent.
The point here is whether western digital privacy is superior to Chinese digital privacy. What you have not caught up on is the fact that Chinese digital privacy has significantly surpassed the west and you are too much of a racist west-supremacist to take on new information that contradicts your supremacist ideology. You spent so much time on reddit internalising the concept that dem sneaky chinese are lies and cheats that your brain just completely shuts down at the very idea that they might be doing it better than the superior white west that deserves supremacy. This is the ideology guiding your thought process.
The only thought you have in your head is "china = mass surveillance" and "west = superior". You have nothing going for you beyond that, it's entirely vibes based which is what makes it so obvious it's a thought created by propaganda. On the otherhand I could talk quite precisely about the information we have on five eyes, nsa and gchq mass surveillance. The UK's use of face recognition. Palantir. Snowden. And so on. China? No evidence. All you've got is "they censor the internet" which, funnily enough, the UK that I'm cursed to be stuck in is doing significantly fucking more.
This provides evidence for a hypothesis I had a few months(years?) back. That as conditions in the west worsen, people in the west will just insist that the "bad guy countries" are worse, regardless of evidence or material reality. It really does look like as the survalliance state increases and worker's and minority rights collapse in the west, westerners will still be insisting it is "fine" because evil China is even worse. "We may be forced by our capitalist overlords to work 24 hours a day, but those damn evil chinese commies force their people to work 25 hours a day!"
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No, I'm saying that you clearly have fallen for the idea that no matter how awful things get in the west, the west's enemies must always be just as bad or worse. You think you're the reasonable one here, doing a "both sides" thing, but you're not. You're falling for bullshit, and think it makes you a genius because you can "see both sides" (but oddly are only ever supporting one side in that).
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No one here is saying China is a utopia, I think that's the problem you're having here. People are saying that quality of life in China is improving, while it is getting worse in the west, and in some areas (like surveillance) the west is now worse than China and will continue to get worse over time. This isn't because of some mindless "pro-China" attitude, but pattern recognition and an understanding of how a socialist government acts vs capitalist governments.
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Mate if you're explicitly denying material reality because it causes too much cognitive dissonance to reckon with the fact that China has clearly surpassed the west in this area I am going to analyse why that might be.
White supremacists get cognitive dissonance about facts to do with racial hierarchies. Cis-hetero male supremacists (patriarchy) get cognitive dissonance about facts to do with gender hierarchies.
You are another kind of supremacist. A western-supremacist. And you are experiencing cognitive dissonance dealing with the fact that the west is not superior to China in this area anymore. The west has declined, China has ascended and continues to improve.
You haven't actually made any argument with your response here. All you've said is "NOOOOOOO YOU'RE WRONG SLUR. IT'S ABOUT NUANCEEEEEEEE" with absolutely zero justification or explanation of what this magical nuance is. You haven't given any explanation because you don't have one, you have vibes, that's it, that's all. And the fact that the information I'm giving you clashes with your vibes-based feelings about this topic causes you emotional distress resulting in cognitive dissonance. This causes you to sling slurs, because it's all you have. A reactionary outburst perfectly in line with all the other reactionaries.
Do I give a shit whether you can speak some Chinese? Absolutely fucking not when you don't know any of the laws we're talking about.
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Are you ok? Did I call you a slur? Do you mean "removed" is a slur?
Hexbear automatically removes slurs. The only thing anyone on hexbear sees when you slur is "removed".
Are you even a Brit?
I don't know why you think you have a free slur use card everywhere because whichever slur you've decided to spew here might be normalised in Britain.
As for the nuance... The point is that it's a FUCKING NUANCE. Visit the fucking country, and in the future try talking shit, or glazing it ONLY after a visit.
Why are you assuming I have not? Continuing your trend of providing absolutely no explanation or justification though I see. Does screaming NUANCE over and over usually go well for you offline with people who are well educated? Have you considered that when you do this people just think to themselves "this guy's an idiot and there's going to be no valuable conversation to be had with him when he can't talk about any of the topic beyond screaming the same word over and over" and then decide to disengage from conversation with you about it? Do you ever think about how other people see or judge you or do you go through life blissfully unaware of more complex social interaction?
As for having no clue... You most probably have zero idea about the country you're talking about. You don't care about me knowing the language and the culture means YOU dont actually care about it. If you cared to learn enough you'd learn to appreciate how much of a culture is IN the language... removed like you only care about pushing your idea...
This is true. I'm impressed. There's a brain in there somewhere trying to express actual thoughts. It's also absolutely nothing to do with any of the points that were previously made though.
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Mate the filters are there for a reason. I know you're desperate to say slurs but have some fucking respect for other people yeah?
You wonder why I'm being so aggressive and shitty with you? It's because it's blatantly obvious you're a shithead mate. Hope nobody fell for your sexpat attempts.
your "fres speech" community
We do not believe in free speech what are you on about? We explicitly believe that some speech and some people should absolutely be ruthlessly controlled and cracked down upon. Specifically the bourgeoisie and bourgeois ideology. We think the opposite about the working class and its theory of liberation - socialist ideology.
For someone who has visited China you don't seem to really know a whole lot about communist ideology. What did you actually do when you were there? Besides tourist shit for crackers without a brain I mean. Would you be able to talk with me at an adult level about the court system? The electoral system? Any of the laws? The organisational structure and ideology that makes it an immensely successful society and emerging world leader? Or is your knowledge really basically just surface level tourist shit and the usual predatory cracker attempts at being a sexpat?
A shame they got banned before they responded to this, I would've loved to see their response. It probably would've just been a "Acktually, I'm the legendary white guy who has lived amongst the oriental savages and therefore understand their culture better than they understand it themselves, so I don't need to know about their government to know it is bad." but you never know, someday a lib might surprise us.
Maybe. I was throwing shit at the wall to provoke them. I often find that if I provoke this type of person enough then throw them little more pleasant changes in my behaviour they will open up because they prefer that to the ultra hostile person I was hitting with them earlier. This then tends to open into something else as I treat them more respectfully once they're opening up. I have a whole strategy that probably just looks like relentless hostility from the outside but it has a purpose.
Takes longer though and they're banned. All good though, I'm the one that reported their slur bypassing so not too much of a surprise.
I also reported the slur bypass. I'm sure they'll interpret it as "sensitive hexbears can't handle reality!" or whatever, but they always do this shit, they deliberately break the rules and get a ban from that, not because we're scared of the ideas of western hegemony and can't handle them. I've never seen one of these guys actually get banned just for posting pro-west stuff (or claiming to be "both sides" while doing that), they always behave in a shitty way and break the rules.
I'm not even particularly sensitive to the word, being here in Britain. But clearly it's a problem for others and it's really easy to just respect that. Brits and Aus suffer from a chronic belief they have a special C-card and can say it as much as they like because it's in the culture to say it. When they're told not to they reactively rebel viewing it as their privilege or whatever.
Yeah, here in Aus, we basically use it like a punctuation mark. But as you said, it isn't about whether they or you were fine with the word, it's about them just refusing to respect others and thinking they are being cheeky or sly when they are being misogynistic, thinking they can "get away with it" because lots of people use the word.
Same over here although less as punctuation, pretty common though. I could talk for hours about the difference in misogyny though, there's a distinct cultural difference in its use that stems from men calling themselves the word as a sort of honorific, "I'm a right nasty cword". This is absolutely not something the americans would use it for, when they say it they explicitly mean WAHMEN whereas that usage around brit/aus was erased by its gangster slang usage. You can see it humourously in stuff [slur warning] like lock stock where it's used self-descriptively by hard man types. I suspect going through that phase linguistically erased its usage as direct intentional misogyny in our culture.
Can you imagine someone like Tate calling themselves this word? No, absolutely not. Because to them it's a different word entirely and this usage would make them uncomfortable. To self describe as the word they apply to weak inferior women? No. They simply wouldn't do it. The linguistic phase we went through in Brit/Aus culture is what generated the difference of opinion here compared to the rest of the world on usage of it.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Meanwhile police are the number one group responsible for making people unsafe.
the secretive, absolutist panopticon is neither secretive, absolutist or panoptic.
it's actually about loving your neighbor under the watchful eye of an all knowing God.
In a totally, not at all related note, journalist Jonathan Cook was recently pulled over by police, addressed by name, and asked why he was driving so far from his home city of Bristol (he was about 1.5hrs drive away visiting family) seemingly in an attempt to intimidate him by making it clear that he was under constant UK police surveillance.