> Do you have a consent problem with surveillance videos?
Ubiquitous CCTV cameras certainly bring issues of privacy, as well as what they should be used for.
One example is Smart Streetlights, which were initially promoted as energy saving lights that would help to measure and manage traffic and pollution, but quickly turned into dragnet police surveillance systems, initially for solving violent crimes but ultimately including property crimes such as vandalism, illegal dumping, and destruction of city property[1], and for protest surveillance [2].
License plate cameras tend to have similar mission creep - they start out for parking enforcement or for red light tickets and turn into a system for tracking citizens whenever and wherever they drive.
> Street cameras in particular seem to me to be a lot more about retaliation and crime solving rather than actual prevention. You still get murdered, but now society catches the killer.
Catching criminals is certainly a good thing to do. It may also prevent crime since criminals often commit more than one crime if left on the streets. Crime prevention is not the only thing that needs to happen. Compare with firefighters that will both need to prevent fires and put out the fires that happened anyway. There is also the perceived need for justice - "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done." Cameras will help in this context.
Are cameras really a privacy problem in our GPS-enabled Wifi BLE cellphone tracking device infested world? A world where your face is tracked on every photo uploaded to Faceboo, and your Wifi and bluetooth MAC are logged in every AP you pass on the street and sent to advertisers and security agencies for storage and processing.
Crime prevention can be improved by using machine learning and AI. We may end up with a Minority Report style society. Is the prevention of crime worth the trade-off?
> People always say they want more police on the street, so if each of these cameras was replaced with a uniformed policeman watching the street would this be better or worse?
> People in cities are captured on CCTV hundreds of times per day but nobody seems to mind.
That argument is a bit vague. How does minding work in this case? People who are opposed to CCTV will try to avoid it. But will that avoidance be visible to the rest of the public? Hardly so. Besides, many cameras tend to be placed at places where cameras blend in and you need to make an effort to actually spot them.
> (ie. literally every street and corner in the city is covered by a camera)
Many street corners have CCTV cameras. The vast majority of them are run by businesses rather than the government and are decentralised, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread. It is possible for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to obtain footage from the CCTV stations with warrants if they physically go to the businesses and ask for it. You are perpetuating a half-truth.
(Context: I am from London. I do not give a shit about CCTV cameras OR the Olympics.)
> you need to completely blanket the area with cameras.
With every passing year, that's easier, cheaper, and less evitable. Hm. The spelling dictionary doesn't think 'evitable' is a word.
People might as well get used to the idea that there will always be a record of what they were doing in public. More cameras and more storage mean never having to delete anything.
> This is the city with police cameras on every block
No, it is not. It is a city where tiny portions have police cameras. Somewhat larger areas have council-controlled cameras that it's fairly easy for police to gain access to. The vast majority of CCTV in London - and in the UK - is privately controlled, and most of it is not networked. Police can get access to it if/when something has happened, but most of them also either don't record or record only on a 24h loop, and access is often enough of a hassle that police does not even bother.
Certainly there is a lot of surveillance in London, and especially the central areas and around important buildings, but it's nowhere near as bad as you imply.
I live in London - I'd have about a 20 minutes walk to the nearest networked, police controlled camera, and about 10-15 minutes walk to any camera. In any direction.
> surveillance vans
Yes, but how many of them do you think there are? They are a rare sight, and they are obvious. I'm sure the Met would like more of them, but they don't have the budget to use them all over the place.
Indeed it is. Why install CCTV cameras when everyone is their own camera-person. Solves the low quality camera problem and multi-angle footage. However...
> Democratisation of surveillance.
Mixed with social media, it's now more like self-surveillance. This is just the start and Nextdoor neighbourhoods take this to dystopian levels. But one clever man once compared this to 'Stalin's Dream'. If that's his dream, then it will soon be everyone's nightmare.
> 2. Install cameras around Police HQs. Don't they want to be safe too?
This is one of the things that makes me laugh with annoyance at the signs at, say, Customs and Immigration when entering the U.S., or at the entrances to courthouses, or (formerly) around airport screening areas. "No pictures or video are permitted. Cell phone use prohibited."
What, precisely, is going on that shouldn't be photographed? If one camera in the ceiling is good, aren't 931 cameras all that much better?
As always, the safety of the enterprise is paramount.
>I have to agree here, I'd have less problem if all camera feeds that the gov't has access to are available for all citizens, including police cars, etc.. at all times.
Remember that stalkers exist. Madison, WI did this momentarily a year or three back, and a lot of abusers and such used it to stalk and harass other people much more consistently than they could have otherwise.
> People act very differently when they are being filmed. Go to the nearest largest city and start filming passerby in an obvious fashion. People will not appreciate it and act differently towards you (likely visibly hostile). That reaction supports the notion that something of value is lost when you blanket-surveil a society.
I don't agree with this premise. People act very differently _when they don't know why they are being filmed_. (Almost) every retail store in the world has had CCTV for 40 years now and people are not alarmed. They know why the filming is happening - as a deterrent to theft. I'd argue that the same principle applies to dashcams, stoplight cameras, helmet cams on bicycles, and, yes, porch or doorbell cams.
Once you start filming people _without_ an obvious reason, then they start acting differently.
The police chief of my city (Newport News VA, USA) recently declared his intention to set up surveillance cameras "from one end of this city to the other" because "I can't put a police officer on every corner" but "I might be able to put up a camera."
> I'm pretty sure humanity is already past the point where this question is timely. We have many cameras watching us all day long and ten years from now there will be even more.
Really? Do you have cameras looking at you all day at work? Or at home, while interacting with your family? I hope not. I also hope that you'd object to any attempts to put such a device.
It's true that society by and large accepts CCTV cameras in public places. But that's not the same as equipping everyone with an always-on camera and having every human interaction recorded. That's just dystopian.
> For what it's worth, maybe this will finally teach people to thing before they act.
That's the oldest argument in the book. And sure, it's true. If you point a camera at people, they will behave "better". But that's insane, that's like saying that since children are most likely to be abused at home, then we should outlaw parenting, and have the state raise all kids using only state-certified™ personnel. Sure, that might work, but it kinda seems like we're losing something important along the way, no?
Having everyone "act better" is a good cause. But surveillance comes at a huge social cost, not to mention the potential for abuse by the watchers or those who decide what "better" is. Your "act better" might be a long way off the government's idea of how it would like citizens to behave.
> Cameras are owned by councils and used to catch minor crimes like dog fouling.[1]
I hate to say it but "not all cameras." A relatively small number of CCTV cameras focused in areas intended to catch and deter specific petty crimes is hardly Enemy of the State stuff, is it? In fact, if you polled the populated, you'd probably not get a lot of objections here.
> Your local police own several hundred cameras directly. [2]
Again, not all cameras. This is really only strengthening my argument about the patchwork nature of CCTV and the practical reality that it's not the all-encompassing Bourne Identity live feed tracking you round the country.
> Your police can request access to any public facing camera at any time.
I already addressed this: this would usually be an after-the-fact tape, not a live feed. They can't just take the tape because that's not their property. They don't necessarily have to tell you because the tape isn't your property either. Does the general public necessarily object to the police being able to use available evidence to solve and prosecute crimes?
How would you feel if the city wanted to install video cameras all over your neighborhood, keeping track of everyone's comings and goings?
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