In the UK (as in the case we're discussing)? No.

> How about your abusive ex, who knows and/or is a cop?

Like all other PNC access, this gets logged. Police genuinely do get disciplined and fired for abusing the PNC. Random officers cannot randomly look up plates on ANPR: only traffic police or more senior officers can and it, like every other access, gets logged.

The Data Protection Act allows us to find out who has been disciplined, demoted or fired, and the Met for example answer those.

> The stalker who somehow knew just where that woman would be when he killed her, was that just bad luck or did he slip someone a few hundred bucks or buy the data from a data broker?

Data brokers do not get PNC data in the UK. And you're imagining an unnecessarily fantastical, conspiratorial explanation of a stalker who "somehow knew where" some woman would be, when stalkers clearly manage this adequately by, like, ordinary stalking skills (and are rarely unknown to their victims in the first place; they usually have knowledge that was volunteered or was acquired firsthand). Women don't need this imaginary scenario to feel fear: old-fashioned hiding in a car and waiting will do it. More high-tech: hiding an AirTag will do it. Following on Facebook will do it.

Also imagining third party violence that happens due to police data access is irrelevant: police officers themselves commit violence. Probably start there.

> There’s a version of an answer to this where access to search these systems is so tightly logged that we never need to wonder about the answer to these questions. I doubt most of the systems being deployed worldwide are anywhere near that standard.

They are in the UK.

Are face recognition cameras a bad thing in the hands of the UK police? Probably sometimes yes. But these conspiratorial hypotheses don't need airing.

FWIW, I still think the US perception of the UK "surveillance state" is largely misplaced and is based on poor journalism about simple numbers of cameras that has never been adequately put into context.

These facial recognition cameras cannot be instantly used on some big national police surveillance mechanism because in essence no such system exists: the vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are not operated by police at all.

Most cameras are operated by local and regional councils (access for which the police would need to issue warrants or make detailed subject/time requests) or private businesses (ditto).

And most of the huge number of cameras the police imagine aren't connected to anything more complex than Ring. Even with Ring footage, British police find that if they want to use doorbell camera footage, it is faster to arrange a time to visit the owner or at best knock on the door of the householder and ask for it to be emailed or copied to an SD card. They do not have broad instant access, much less broad, instant, warrantless access.

The biggest risk is not outright abuse but malfeasance/misfeasance overuse, much more dull-witted, instant and humdrum: for example some of the operators perceive the desire not to walk past one of them to be evidence of criminal intent, and they use that as a justification for a stop and search.

You just ask the customer to tell you, perhaps with one of those driving monitoring apps/devices that people use to lower premiums. Pretty commonplace now.

FWIW, having worked on car insurance applications, most insurance companies do not much care about microtargeting consumers in this way. Beyond looking at their claims history and the kind of car they are driving, it is a large-scale numbers game, and the way you know which customers, for example, tend to go out more at night when it is dangerous is to look at their age (more likely very young) and gender (more likely male). And then you just make them all pay more. There's no particular reason to get any more forensic than that; it's more costly and it probably doesn't deliver much extra value.

And if young drivers complain, "hey, I am an excellent safe driver, I've done my advanced test, and I don't take risks", you say: "Great. Use one of our driving monitoring apps or devices, prove it and we'll happily give you lower premiums!"

I could tell you a couple of horror stories I am not going to repeat on the internet because they are old news now and times have changed, but I really must say, it's not necessary to imagine what government data could be used for in the hands of insurance companies: it's much more likely that insurance companies will simply incentivise customers to hand over the data. People who want lower premiums will jump through all sorts of hoops to get them.