{"slug": "spies-in-the-sky-how-worried-should-we-be-about-ai-enabled-smart-lamp-posts", "title": "Spies in the sky: how worried should we be about AI-enabled smart lamp-posts?", "summary": "Conflow Power Group (CPG) has installed the first UK iLamps in a Warwickshire hospital car park, which are solar-powered smart lamp-posts that can double as AI data centres with facial and number plate recognition. CPG chairman Edward Fitzpatrick told the BBC World Service that the lamp-posts could ultimately track missing persons or fight crime, but only in partnership with authorities. Privacy group Big Brother Watch has raised concerns about the potential for expanded AI surveillance capabilities, such as gait analysis, while local residents expressed little worry, with one stating, \"You don't mind them being there unless you're up to no good.", "body_md": "How would you feel if your neighbourhood lamp-posts could recognise your number plate, and also your face? Maybe you wouldn’t mind, given how long we’ve 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 – that would be good, right? This is what Conflow Power Group (CPG) in [Warwickshire](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/warwickshire) claims for its iLamps, the first of their kind in the UK.\n\nWhat if lamp-posts had the potential to incorporate new AI capability – gait analysis, suspicious behaviours – that you haven’t 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 “panopticon state”](https://www.thenational.scot/news/25780001.shabana-mahmood-proposes-ai-panopticon-system-state-surveillance/) – that is, a state that could watch you at all times (as Shabana Mahmood already has) – 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 – who would own it?\n\nIt’s drizzling in Warwickshire, where I’m hoping to answer at least some of these questions in the hospital car park where some of these new “smart” lamp-posts have been installed. But if it wasn’t 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 “[double as a revenue-generating distributed AI datacentre](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98r4e594p7o)”, 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 – 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’s chairman, Edward Fitzpatrick, [told the BBC World Service’s Tech Life programme](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct8jxs) that the lamp-posts could ultimately track down missing persons or fight crime, with the proviso that this would only be developed in partnership “with the relevant authority”.\n\nCPG has been “extensively covered by worldwide media”, according to its own statement, and doesn’t 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’t respond. Fair play – it’s a hospital.\n\nA 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: “The town centre is already full of cameras, and it’s fine. You don’t mind them being there unless you’re up to no good.” 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’t want anyone to know you’d been to the hospital? What if you weren’t supposed to be in a pub? Don’t 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.\n\nTejal, 41, also waiting at the hospital bus stop, says: “I think we have to move on and accept that things change.” She’s a radiologist, and just seeing AI’s capability in her own sector makes her extremely anxious about AI as a whole. “I have anxieties for my children,” she says. That they won’t find entry-level jobs? “That, and that they’ll lose the ability to celebrate and find joy from the things we used to.” Privacy concerns do seem comparatively minor, compared with that.\n\nPolicy 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: “We see this quite often where local councils or other government agencies are … ‘swindled’ is a strong word, but they’re sold these tools as magic wands when there are limitations to what they can actually do.”\n\nProf Rabih Bashroush, director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation at the University of East London, is blunt: “AI datacentres? There’s absolutely no chance this will fly: the technology doesn’t work, there’s not enough power, the economics won’t work …” Solar power to run the iLamps off-grid might work in Nigeria, but in Britain the amount generated by the lamp-posts is “negligible”, he says. You might be able to run an app that was “not mission critical, that you didn’t mind shutting down for a few days” – such as recognising whether a parking spot was occupied – but bigger claims for facial recognition are “just hype. Forget it – this has no legs.”\n\nIf he sounds impatient, it’s because he is: “It’s 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,” he says. So a company might make a large claim, including a few AI buzzwords, ahead of a funding round; engineers don’t contradict them, local authorities don’t understand them and nobody else is even aware that anything has moved on since CCTV was invented.\n\nChaggar goes to great lengths to explain the conceptual difference between facial recognition and CCTV: “Facial 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’s much more like a fingerprint or DNA. It’s not like a passport – you can’t get another face.”\n\nAnother problem, Chaggar says, is that, “a lot of these technologies and infrastructures have capacity to add function later. Hammersmith and Fulham [in London] are updating their CCTV and it’s possible to embed facial recognition, monitor suspicious shopping behaviour, add aggression detection. So you can just turn the switch and it’s all there overnight.” A friend who lives in Fulham sent, by chance, a picture of a camera above a parking restrictions sign – it looks like a cross between Darth Vader and a beetle, and it whirrs as you go past, as if to indicate that it’s following your movements.\n\nThis throws up all the ageless privacy concerns, and it’s 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: “I 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’t even have a dog!” His friend Bob, 48, has ended up functionally off-grid, with no computer and a basic brick phone – a policymaker would probably describe him as “excluded” – simply because “some people like to be private”.\n\nAnother question about facial recognition software is: exactly how good are algorithms at detecting aggression and suspicious behaviour? “A lot of the software is pseudo-scientific,” Chaggar says. “So a company might try to sell emotion-detection, [claiming that] if people are walking through a train station, you can see if they’re angry or they’re about to be aggressive. There’s very little evidence to suggest that it’s accurate. If you’re a disabled person who moves differently, you might be flagged and have an intervention.” But the real question local authorities and any agents of the state should ask themselves, Chaggar says, is: “Are you happy to have your political enemies having these capabilities? Because you’re building an infrastructure that is here to stay.”\n\nYou can see that writ large in policing – the Home Office signed off on the use of facial recognition more than a decade ago, and the police have been “essentially using the public as guinea pigs for the past 10 years,” Chaggar says. What happens when the home secretary tells BBC 5 Live, [as she did earlier this year](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ydekxkd20o), that “you can’t enjoy any of your liberties in any country if you’re not safe”? This sledgehammer logic, in which all liberties are secondary to the state’s rights as your protector, is chilling from a supposedly leftwing government. But the greater worry is that this doesn’t 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.\n\nWherever there’s 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’s attempt to “[connect the physical world to a digital environment](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/internet-things-policy)”. “This was way back, before exiting Europe,” he remembers. “One 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, ‘Sure, but the data is ours.’” That never got resolved: the contracts had been poorly constructed and the local authority lost the data.\n\nIf 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’s already widely in use to prevent shoplifting. “We’ve seen misidentification by the police,” Chaggar says, “but in retail, when people are misidentified, it’s Kafkaesque. You’re just [blacklisted from the store](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/03/guilty-until-proven-innocent-shoppers-falsely-identified-by-facial-recognition-struggle-to-clear-their-name).”\n\nAnd again, how much do people care, really? If you’re not allowed in a shop and you don’t know why; if a private company has a contract with your NHS trust, vaunting tech that isn’t operational yet and might never work, but nobody told, let alone asked, you; if the home secretary thinks it’s fine for the eyes of the state to be on you at all times – 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?\n\nThe New Yorker essayist Ted Chiang [wrote some time ago](https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey) about the habit of projecting on to AI negatives that were actually not about tech but about economic systems, concluding: “Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.” Am I projecting on to AI and surveillance tech anxieties that are really about authoritarian politics?\n\n“Well, if you haven’t got anything to hide,” says Sarah, 55, “I can’t see how it would be a problem. I’m presuming they’re actually lamps as well?”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/spies-in-the-sky-how-worried-should-we-be-about-ai-enabled-smart-lamp-posts", "canonical_source": "https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/28/spies-in-sky-worried-ai-enabled-smart-lamp-posts-surveillance", "published_at": "2026-07-28 15:43:12+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-28 15:52:21.792836+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy", "computer-vision"], "entities": ["Conflow Power Group", "Edward Fitzpatrick", "Big Brother Watch", "Shabana Mahmood", "BBC World Service", "Warwickshire", "Katsina state"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/spies-in-the-sky-how-worried-should-we-be-about-ai-enabled-smart-lamp-posts", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/spies-in-the-sky-how-worried-should-we-be-about-ai-enabled-smart-lamp-posts.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/spies-in-the-sky-how-worried-should-we-be-about-ai-enabled-smart-lamp-posts.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/spies-in-the-sky-how-worried-should-we-be-about-ai-enabled-smart-lamp-posts.jsonld"}}