{"id":831340,"date":"2026-07-28T12:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T12:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/831340\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T12:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T12:19:08","slug":"spies-in-the-sky-how-worried-should-we-be-about-the-arrival-of-ai-enabled-smart-lamp-posts-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/831340\/","title":{"rendered":"Spies in the sky: how worried should we be about the arrival of AI-enabled smart lamp-posts? | Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"

How would you feel if your neighbourhood lamp-posts could recognise your number plate, and also your face? Maybe you wouldn\u2019t mind, given how long we\u2019ve had automatic number plate recognition and CCTV. What about if that lamp-post could power itself through its own solar panels, and perhaps find another use for any extra power generated \u2013 that would be good, right? This is what Conflow Power Group (CPG) in Warwickshire<\/a> claims for its iLamps, the first of their kind in the UK.<\/p>\n

What if lamp-posts had the potential to incorporate new AI capability \u2013 gait analysis, suspicious behaviours \u2013 that you haven\u2019t even heard of? This is what the organisation Big Brother Watch worries about. And what if the home secretary had explicitly said she believed in a \u201cpanopticon state\u201d<\/a> \u2013 that is, a state that could watch you at all times (as Shabana Mahmood already has) \u2013 and what if she still had a job when the lamp-post eyes got their updates? Or what if the next home secretary was even keener on hyper-surveillance (hard to imagine), and the street apparatus was already in place? What about all the data this would harvest \u2013 who would own it?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s drizzling in Warwickshire, where I\u2019m hoping to answer at least some of these questions in the hospital car park where some of these new \u201csmart\u201d lamp-posts have been installed. But if it wasn\u2019t for me, nobody would probably be talking about them, not least because few have heard anything about them. Not many people know that the iLamp is not just solar-powered but can \u201cdouble as a revenue-generating distributed AI datacentre<\/a>\u201d, according to CPG, let alone what that means. And nobody, not even me, knows how much of that potential functionality has been realised in the UK model \u2013 only what CPG has announced: that it has signed an agreement with the government of Katsina state, Nigeria, to supply it with 50,000 of these iLamps, which have additional surveillance potential for both vehicles and faces. CPG\u2019s chairman, Edward Fitzpatrick, told the BBC World Service\u2019s Tech Life programme<\/a> that the lamp-posts could ultimately track down missing persons or fight crime, with the proviso that this would only be developed in partnership \u201cwith the relevant authority\u201d.<\/p>\n

CPG has been \u201cextensively covered by worldwide media\u201d, according to its own statement, and doesn\u2019t take further questions, directing the media to its online material. As for the Warwickshire lamp-posts, the local authority directs all questions to the hospital, and the hospital doesn\u2019t respond. Fair play \u2013 it\u2019s a hospital.<\/p>\n

A London lamp-post well equipped with cameras. Photograph: Shomos Uddin\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

A number of local residents have taken refuge from the rain in a bus shelter, most of them waiting for a partner to pick them up, and many are willing to chat. Karl, 52, who has been in a pub nearby, speaks for almost everyone when he says: \u201cThe town centre is already full of cameras, and it\u2019s fine. You don\u2019t mind them being there unless you\u2019re up to no good.\u201d No amount of loaded questions (What if you were doing something that was legal today but illegal in a year? What if the surveillance became predictive rather than reactive? What if you didn\u2019t want anyone to know you\u2019d been to the hospital? What if you weren\u2019t supposed to be in a pub? Don\u2019t you think you should at least have been asked whether you wanted it?) can separate anyone I speak to from the view that facial recognition is a tolerable part of life for a right-thinking citizen.<\/p>\n

Tejal, 41, also waiting at the hospital bus stop, says: \u201cI think we have to move on and accept that things change.\u201d She\u2019s a radiologist, and just seeing AI\u2019s capability in her own sector makes her extremely anxious about AI as a whole. \u201cI have anxieties for my children,\u201d she says. That they won\u2019t find entry-level jobs? \u201cThat, and that they\u2019ll lose the ability to celebrate and find joy from the things we used to.\u201d Privacy concerns do seem comparatively minor, compared with that.<\/p>\n

Policy and technical experts are sceptical about some of the claims made for smart lamp-posts. Jasleen Chaggar, senior legal and policy officer at Big Brother Watch, says: \u201cWe see this quite often where local councils or other government agencies are \u2026 \u2018swindled\u2019 is a strong word, but they\u2019re sold these tools as magic wands when there are limitations to what they can actually do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prof Rabih Bashroush, director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation at the University of East London, is blunt: \u201cAI datacentres? There\u2019s absolutely no chance this will fly: the technology doesn\u2019t work, there\u2019s not enough power, the economics won\u2019t work \u2026\u201d Solar power to run the iLamps off-grid might work in Nigeria, but in Britain the amount generated by the lamp-posts is \u201cnegligible\u201d, he says. You might be able to run an app that was \u201cnot mission critical, that you didn\u2019t mind shutting down for a few days\u201d \u2013 such as recognising whether a parking spot was occupied \u2013 but bigger claims for facial recognition are \u201cjust hype. Forget it \u2013 this has no legs.\u201d<\/p>\n

If he sounds impatient, it\u2019s because he is: \u201cIt\u2019s getting more and more difficult to get an independent opinion on things, because a lot of experts are in the industry now, and their view would have to align with their organisation,\u201d he says. So a company might make a large claim, including a few AI buzzwords, ahead of a funding round; engineers don\u2019t contradict them, local authorities don\u2019t understand them and nobody else is even aware that anything has moved on since CCTV was invented.<\/p>\n

The Metropolitan Police trialling a facial recognition system in London last May. Photograph: Chris J Ratcliffe\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Chaggar goes to great lengths to explain the conceptual difference between facial recognition and CCTV: \u201cFacial recognition is not just passively recalling something, unlike CCTV, which you then check after the fact. What facial recognition does is real-time identity check: it\u2019s much more like a fingerprint or DNA. It\u2019s not like a passport \u2013 you can\u2019t get another face.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another problem, Chaggar says, is that, \u201ca lot of these technologies and infrastructures have capacity to add function later. Hammersmith and Fulham [in London] are updating their CCTV and it\u2019s possible to embed facial recognition, monitor suspicious shopping behaviour, add aggression detection. So you can just turn the switch and it\u2019s all there overnight.\u201d A friend who lives in Fulham sent, by chance, a picture of a camera above a parking restrictions sign \u2013 it looks like a cross between Darth Vader and a beetle, and it whirrs as you go past, as if to indicate that it\u2019s following your movements.<\/p>\n

This throws up all the ageless privacy concerns, and it\u2019s interesting how many people will wave away CCTV as a fact of modern life, but spontaneously raise how much they absolutely hate being listened to by their phone. Karl says: \u201cI was talking to my mother the other day about dog nail clippers, and the advert came up on my phone that evening. I had my microphone off. I don\u2019t even have a dog!\u201d His friend Bob, 48, has ended up functionally off-grid, with no computer and a basic brick phone \u2013 a policymaker would probably describe him as \u201cexcluded\u201d \u2013 simply because \u201csome people like to be private\u201d.<\/p>\n

Acting suspiciously, or just a bit chilly? Photograph: Posed by model; David Wall\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Another question about facial recognition software is: exactly how good are algorithms at detecting aggression and suspicious behaviour? \u201cA lot of the software is pseudo-scientific,\u201d Chaggar says. \u201cSo a company might try to sell emotion-detection, [claiming that] if people are walking through a train station, you can see if they\u2019re angry or they\u2019re about to be aggressive. There\u2019s very little evidence to suggest that it\u2019s accurate. If you\u2019re a disabled person who moves differently, you might be flagged and have an intervention.\u201d But the real question local authorities and any agents of the state should ask themselves, Chaggar says, is: \u201cAre you happy to have your political enemies having these capabilities? Because you\u2019re building an infrastructure that is here to stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can see that writ large in policing \u2013 the Home Office signed off on the use of facial recognition more than a decade ago, and the police have been \u201cessentially using the public as guinea pigs for the past 10 years,\u201d Chaggar says. What happens when the home secretary tells BBC 5 Live, as she did earlier this year<\/a>, that \u201cyou can\u2019t enjoy any of your liberties in any country if you\u2019re not safe\u201d? This sledgehammer logic, in which all liberties are secondary to the state\u2019s rights as your protector, is chilling from a supposedly leftwing government. But the greater worry is that this doesn\u2019t feel like the right time in politics to roll the dice on surveillance technology, basing our acceptance of it on the assumption that all future governments will be pro-social and democratic.<\/p>\n

\u2018If you haven\u2019t got anything to hide, I don\u2019t see how it would be a problem.\u2019 Photograph: Justin Paget\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Wherever there\u2019s potential to collect data, it throws up the question of who owns it: Bashroush used to work with the Internet of Things, the European Commission\u2019s attempt to \u201cconnect the physical world to a digital environment<\/a>\u201d. \u201cThis was way back, before exiting Europe,\u201d he remembers. \u201cOne of the challenges we saw was with a supplier [who was] basically collecting garbage from homes in the Netherlands, then optimising truck journeys and planning, based on your habits. The council that ran the programme was very happy with it, and tried to open the bidding a year later to get a more competitive price. The company said, \u2018Sure, but the data is ours.\u2019\u201d That never got resolved: the contracts had been poorly constructed and the local authority lost the data.<\/p>\n

If you want to see facial recognition go wrong without even any authoritarian intent or tech chicanery, you just have to look at the retail sector, where it\u2019s already widely in use to prevent shoplifting. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen misidentification by the police,\u201d Chaggar says, \u201cbut in retail, when people are misidentified, it\u2019s Kafkaesque. You\u2019re just blacklisted from the store<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

And again, how much do people care, really? If you\u2019re not allowed in a shop and you don\u2019t know why; if a private company has a contract with your NHS trust, vaunting tech that isn\u2019t operational yet and might never work, but nobody told, let alone asked, you; if the home secretary thinks it\u2019s fine for the eyes of the state to be on you at all times \u2013 are these the building blocks of a dystopia, or do they just remind us how we used to describe dystopia, back before these surveillance capabilities existed?<\/p>\n

The New Yorker essayist Ted Chiang wrote some time ago<\/a> about the habit of projecting on to AI negatives that were actually not about tech but about economic systems, concluding: \u201cCapitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.\u201d Am I projecting on to AI and surveillance tech anxieties that are really about authoritarian politics?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, if you haven\u2019t got anything to hide,\u201d says Sarah, 55, \u201cI can\u2019t see how it would be a problem. I\u2019m presuming they\u2019re actually lamps as well?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How would you feel if your neighbourhood lamp-posts could recognise your number plate, and also your face? Maybe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":831341,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-831340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/831341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}