Legislature Building? Around Courthouses? Banks? Public Transit? Schools? Traffic? On the Streets? Should they exist in all of these places, only some of them, or none at all? What’s your opinion?
(Btw: I remember my highschool had them, felt kinda creepy since I distrust the school admin, like… even the other places with cameras didn’t feel as weird)
I’m more so afraid of the AI detection and algorithms that the cameras are connected to. A simple camera can turn in to 1984 in no time.
At intersections, front porches, dashcams, on policemen. Not in schools (is it even legal to videotape children like that?) Not on public sidewalks.
I understand them in private businesses, too. But a network of surveillance, no.
(is it even legal to videotape children like that?)
Apparantly it is, at least in some parts of the United States of America. AFIAK, its allowed in hallways, but not classrooms, but somehow, its allowed in the cafeteria.
I’m a privacy advocate, but I do not believe that the cameras themselves are the main threat to privacy, and do not necessarily have a problem with cameras placed in any of the locations you listed, given the following conditions:
The camera system is closed circuit with the footage stored securely on a device on the premises, not connected to or stored on the internet, not combined and analyzed automatically/algorithmically with other footage and data, and the footage is deleted or overwritten after a reasonable period of time.
I believe the main threats to privacy involve how the footage is stored and analyzed.
Seconded. A lot of harms we see from surveillance cameras (and all kinds of other tech) come from how and to whom the data is made accessible to, rather than the cameras themselves.
It’s fine if my neighbor has a doorbell with a camera on it so they can see when a package is delivered, when their kid comes home, or have video of something happening on the sidewalk that could possibly be needed as evidence in a court case, where they can manually export a video and give it to whoever would require it. But it’s not fine if that video is being always uploaded to a corporation’s servers, and they’re handing it off to the police, for example.
Surprisingly, Ring actually stopped doing this given enough backlash, but the risk still remains of future changes to that policy, any breach or software vulnerability, etc.
Ring has said they’re going to start doing it again. They stopped until people cared about something else and now that people are distracted they’re gonna start doing it again.
I was just thinking about this the other day. Cameras can be a powerful tool, but in the same way as an axe is a powerful tool. It’s all about whose hands wield them, and to what end. I’m loathe to prohibit them as often they are the most reliable witness to events, but I also don’t trust essentially anyone to wield their power on a day to day basis. Companies want to use them to collect data for marketing purposes. Governments want to use them to suppress dissent. People want them because they are marketed as making you safer, but most people would probably get as much benefit from a fake security camera as from the most expensive real camera. The systems can become harmful themselves without careful setup and maintenance due to malicious actors. (mirai) How do you empower beneficial uses without empowering malicious ones? I don’t really have an answer. I just recognize it as another facet in the larger question of proliferation of powerful tools.
I think a good way to enable beneficial use while minimizing the possibility of harm is to avoid cloud based services as much as possible. Especially for residential use. If companies made a convenient method of plug and play self hosted cameras, it’d be a hit. But you cant beat the convenienceand price of another mega corp cheap cloud based security camera
I like the idea but I won’t rate it as likely. ‘Plug n play’ and ‘self-hosted’ are generally not compatible concepts, especially for consumer-type users, much less with ‘affordable’ tossed into the mix. Even just self-hosted by itself is a bit of a reach for most people.
Perhaps self hosted wasn’t the right term. What I was going for was locally hosted. It woulf be a single device with OS and drives all installed. It would not be affordable, but it’s the only way to make it convenient
Ah, okay. I see now. I’ve seen things that were essentially that, easy to set up DVR/NVRs for use with compatible cameras.
I still doubt its usefulness for residences though. It won’t prevent you from being a victim any better than dummy cameras and a fake security system sign. Its value as an evidentiary tool is based on your local police, so everyone’s experience will vary there.If I understand correctly, you’re saying you wouldn’t be able to catch them live? I understood basically all cameras to be primarily for evidence. There would be a level of deterence to some extent, but the cameras themselves wouldn’t physically stop a break in. Even if you got a notification and the police came, theres still nothing stopping them from getting away before the police get there. My understanding of the average persons camera setup is not to have a 3rd party monitoring service call the police, or for them to be able to call the police, but rather to have footage of the event.
The question of whether someone buys as deterrent or evidence collection is individual. Both have some value. Deterrence is actually a much more important part of why one might want cameras, as it puts up signs for experienced thieves that the next place over might be a safer target, and can discourage crimes of opportunity from less organized individuals because people behave differently when they know a camera is watching.
For evidence collection, value is really determined by your enforcement limits and desired goals. If you can’t get your local police to take an active interest in the case or go vigilante yourself, the money you spent on cameras won’t mean anything. If your system doesn’t get usable identifying characteristics, it’s useless. And the dark truth of the matter is that evidence means nothing if your goal is safety. If your goal is to be safer, what use is evidence, at any quality? It’s great on insurance forms if you have insurance but won’t replace your family’s physical or mental well being.
Evidentiary value is rarely zero, but people should be aware of what that value is when considering their options.
I’m a big proponent of police body cams.
acab and it should be legally required that their enforcement of the law has a neutral witness (the camera)
An issue with this is that they are documenting people in their worst moments (violence, fights, rape, abuse, drugs, accidents, etc.). What happens to that footage? Are all cops allowed to freely access it / share it between them? What if the footage gets hacked/leaks, and people all over the world can leer/laugh at people in their most vulnerable moments, or find them in real life and harass them?
Additionally, could police use out-of-context footage to sway public opinion on people (for example, only getting to a scene where a person was being hounded and attacked by people and then defended themselves, and so in the footage you only see that person being violent) (edit:) or in a protest where people become violent/confrontational only after police instigation
Additionally, could police use out-of-context footage to sway public opinion on people
I mean that’s not really an argument against the cameras themselves, but against the act of selectively editing it.
That’s like saying photos shouldn’t be allowed as evidence because photoshop exists.
Maybe a neutral commission (sort of like a jury) should be the ones that handle the the data.
CCTV is fine in my opinion, what isn’t fine is flock cameras being used on a national level tracking hundreds of millions of people.
Obligatory deflock mention! (If you see a camera in your city that’s not on the map, add it!)
And it sure would be a shame if such cameras got vandalized somehow. Spray painted over, shot at, knocked off the proper viewing angle… So many terrible fates that could befall a camera near you!
snipe it with a paintball gun from afar
Depends what you do with the information. I dont care if a hotel wants to surveil me moving around their building. But I do care when large networks of security cameras track my movement throughout a city.
I dont expect full privacy walking into different shops and through trainstations but I expect those to just be there to review footage if something goes bad. No face scanning no sketchy shit.
I do not mind them like at the crossroads or around the traffic signs, bus or railway stations, airports, museums, etc. But, if it is like every 5 metres… Even if it is said it is for security reason… I do not know… It feels more like recording everything I do
My problems with surveillance is not being surveiled but how that information is used. Surveillance is just a tool and, like weapons, are neither inherently good nor bad.
This is true but we have pedos in charge, so we all know how that data will be used.
Indeed, which is why we need to take privacy and security seriously.
Cameras I’m ok with, facial recognition and all that other bullshit I’m not ok with though. Camera feeds are good for piecing together accidents and stuff like that but companies shouldn’t be able to track down all of your personal information just because you walked into their shop with facial recognition scanners at the door.
imo I should be for real time observation and referencing a specific thing.
I’ve worked in places that had to have cameras everywhere but also had strict prohibition on viewing the archived data, because it was in a hospital setting. and people’s privacy was a legal issue
i don’t think it should be used to monitor people without cause basically
Only cameras for very sensitive areas should be actually monitored.
For anything else, the rule should be recording only and then deleting after 48 or 72 hours unless something important happened.
On private property: up to owner as long as they don’t record what is going on outside the property. Notify about recording with signs.
Public spaces: only if there is a good reason to.
Good reason is quite the strechable definition tbf
On privat property. Trainstations and airports. Museums and other collections.
When i was in the UK i was shocked how there are cameras everywhere
I’m ok if they are used to extend surveillance and actively prevent a problem. For example in a shop to block shoplifters or in a swimming pool to spot someone drowning.
I find them a lazy and often useless solution in most of the other cases. It’s nice to have the video of a robbery or a car accident to investigate later, but I don’t want the robbery or the accident to happen in the first place. Imagine the case of an homicide: it’s cool to catch the killer, but the victim remains dead. Cameras are a cheap “solution” to have the illusion of control.
Plus: the whole face recognition thing is going to be a huge problem in the future in the less-democratic countries.
