Youngest Person to Be Diagnosed With Dementia in Britain Dies at 24

There’s so much we still don’t understand.

UK gov’t plans tour to fix argument to public on national digital identity

UK government officials have admitted that the initial attempt to communicate a new policy for introducing national digital identity was flawed, and ministers will do penance in the form of a tour across the nation to engage with the public.

The public consultation planned for 2026 will include meetings between government MPs and voters to go beyond the normal consultation process, PublicTechnology reports.

The public consultation was originally slated to begin this year, but has been delayed by Cabinet Office taking over the process from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), according to the report.

And the government has a lot of explaining to do. PublicTechnology points out that the government is aware that it did not make a convincing enough case for how the digital ID will help reduce illegal immigration.

Subsequent communication about public services fueled claims of a sprawling, overreaching and costly big-government project.

Ping Identity GTM CTO Alex Laurie notes in a column for Tech Monitor that the 1.8 billion pound (roughly US$2.4 billion) cost figure estimated by the OBR should be measured against the £200 million fraud costs the UK economy every year. Then there is the loss of productivity from all the time and effort wasted on inefficient, manual and paper-based identity checks for everything from home rentals to public service access.

Laurie, as a professional, moves on quickly to the real issues around database and data sharing architecture, data minimization and cryptography. But his main point will bear both repeating and further explanation.

The government has said it doesn’t recognize the OBR’s cost figure, because not enough about the system’s design has been decided.

As Frank Hersey of MLex points out on LinkedIn, Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary Josh Simons said explicitly during a Monday Parliamentary Committee hearing that “we are building this vital public good for our country, not outsourcing it and not leaving it to private companies.”

Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones told digital identity industry representatives including TechUK, the Association of Digital Verification Professionals (ADVP) and the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) last week that the consultation will be fully open, and that no final decisions have yet been made.

Someone is off-message.

Officials removed exhibit on Black soldiers in WWII over fear of Trump’s ‘ire,’ emails show

Holocaust museums and Jewish veterans’ groups objected to the move, which had not previously been explained, as distorting memory.

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The post Officials removed exhibit on Black soldiers in WWII over fear of Trump’s ‘ire,’ emails show appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

U.S. and Israel diverge over the road map to Damascus

One year after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, policymakers and officials in the United States and Israel remain increasingly divided over how to confront the changing landscape in Damascus. Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, the IDF moved into a U.N. buffer zone inside southern Syria to protect Israel’s… Read More

Why leisure matters for a good life, according to Aristotle

What we do in our free time says a lot about what makes us happy, our priorities and the type of life we want to live.

The post Why leisure matters for a good life, according to Aristotle appeared first on THE ETHICS CENTRE.

London Police facial recognition expansion casts wide net

London’s Metropolitan Police have a new community crime-fighting strategy that expands the use of facial recognition and other technologies to catch the city’s “most harmful offenders,” and apparently thieves on e-bikes.

Live facial recognition use will be expanded across all London boroughs. Pilots of operator-initiated facial recognition and cameras fixed to “street furniture” will continue. Retrospective facial recognition capabilities will “continue to grow,” but so will public engagement to build trust. First-responder drones will be deployed across the city for to rapidly reach incidents.

The Met says “officers will expand the use of technology and data to target London’s most harmful offenders” under the plan, which aligns with priorities at the national level.

But a rash of thefts involving people riding e-bikes and e-scooters has London residents “particularly concerned,” according to the announcement. The Independent reports these concerns are largely related to phone thefts.

Two accounts of operations to seize e-bikes and a quote on the Met’s crackdown on them and e-scooters follows.

Facial recognition “has many uses and it will pick up people that speed, so it will pick up people on e-bikes and in all sorts of situations,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley told The Independent.

Further details are offered in the “New Met for London Phase 2 2025-2028” plan, which extends the strategy of its 2023 predecessor. A new Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) will be launched around the beginning of 2027, in part to give Met Police instant identity verification capabilities through facial recognition and other biometrics.

High scale, low confidence

Home Office announced a plan to expand police use of facial recognition across the UK last week, as well as to consider making images from the national passport and driver’s license databases available to police.

There are already more than 19 million custody photos in the police national database (PND). Home Office licensed facial recognition software from Cognitec in 2020 for searches against the PND, but has never updated it.

Now the Guardian and Liberty Investigates have revealed that an NPL assessment commissioned by Home Office showed police officials potential problems with bias in the system in September, 2024.

The demographic differentials of facial recognition algorithms (including from Cognitec) as assessed by NIST were publicly available even before Home Office licensed the software, so any suggestion that they were previously unaware of the issue only introduces more questions.

In response to the NPL’s findings, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) ordered the confidence threshold for matches to be raised so that false matches would be filtered out, reducing bias, but police forces complained that the change led to too few leads. NPCC documents show potential matches fell from 56 percent of searches to 14 percent.

The NPCC said police found the change meant “a once effective tactic returned results of limited benefit.”

“Evidence is mounting as to why it is crucial we have robust safeguards in place before this powerful and intrusive technology is expanded any further,” says Liberty Policy and Campaigns Officer Charlie Whelton. “For too long, police forces have set the terms, and we are now seeing the real-life consequences.”