> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
>The way I see it, they're a tool, part of a bigger picture that aids in security and safety.
There's a particular rock in the Atlantic off the coast of Europe and East or Ireland that's been carpet bombed with CCTV cameras. Ask anyone who lives there and they'll tell you that they're still waiting for the reduction of petty crime the cameras were supposed to bring. There always seems to be plenty of money to fund more cameras and more surveillance but never any money to fund the Good Old Fashioned Police Work(TM) needed to follow up on all the crime those cameras see.
> 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.
> I’m not sure why people think just because they have cameras that the police
will follow up on the video evidence and make arrests
The plain answer to your question is that because some times they do. But the implication of your rhetoric is that they never will. That's the problem.
Being "made whole" is actually a separate concern from helping to catch the perp, and it doesn't help to brush off one concern in favor of another. Like for example if someone stole most of my computing gear, financial compensation by insurance could not possibly make me whole (months of bespoke setup and customization). But it would be nice to know that the perp got punished, regardless of whether they had already sold my stuff.
And personally, I'd double down on the cynicism and point to having video evidence as a good way of documenting the incident for insurance purposes, lest they attempt to screw you some how.
(Nothing in my comments should be construed as condoning having Internet connected cameras running proprietary crapware. Rather I'm just talking about the general motivation for cameras, and unfortunately many people are insensitive to the crapware)
> Not really? I don't look for cameras and I legit don't see them pretty much anywhere. I know they're in all the tube stations, but it doesn't make me wary?
Are you saying or are you asking?
> I'm sure cameras mean you're less likely to do things which are not allowed - but guess what, I actually would rather have less vandalism, less assault, etc etc.
Yes, and you are also less likely to do things that are allowed, but that could still harm you depending on who's watching. Kiss your girlfriend. Do a silly dance. Participate in that protest. Use that t-shirt with the political message. Hold hands with your gay lover. The public space changes when you point a camera at it.
Don't worry too much about arguing with me -- I will lose this argument. Every day that passes, fewer people will remember what a world without constant monitoring looked like. You can't miss what you never experienced.
> Now if you want to straw man and say "well they can make anything illegal and use the cameras against you" - well sure.
A strawman is when you attack a claim that was not actually made by your opponent. Maybe the expression you are looking for is "slippery slope"?
> Come back to me when they do that,
"They" have already done that over and over in analogous historical situations. I can show them to you, but you will probably just say that I am exaggerating and that this is a different situation. Just as people did back then.
> until then I'll keep enjoying lower crime rates.
Crime rates have been going down for decades, long before all this new tech. The perception of crime rates has been going up, because of many things including the lowering standards of journalism. I live in a very safe big city where CCTV cameras are mostly illegal.
> 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 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.
> 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.
>which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!)
These cameras are mostly privately owned. They're not part of a police surveillance system.
Bear in mind that the Metropolitan Police only has about 33,000 officers. Even if they all spent all day watching surveillance footage, they wouldn't get anywhere close to looking at the footage from all of those cameras. What happens in practice is that lazy (or overworked) police officers will occasionally bother to retrieve CCTV footage that might be relevant to solving a crime.
I can see why people feel creeped out by CCTV cameras if they're not used to them. However, painting London as some sort of hypersurveillance environment isn't true to life (at least in my experience of living there).
It's also worth adding that CCTV is an almost absurdly inefficient means of spying on people if you actually have malicious intentions. We all now carry personal tracking devices that are immeasurably more useful for this purpose.
> There's a huge difference between deploying cameras in public places so that u can go back and look at the records if something happens,
Wait a sec, I agree with you, but that's not what the parent comment claims. It says "surveillance is a bad thing period" and that's just not true, some forms of surveillance in some places can both help police and make people feel safer. Would anyone in their right mind rather park their new car in some dark alley, than under the eye of cctv camera? Of course not... so parent commenter made a huge bad generalization and that's the part I was commenting on.
> 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?
> (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.)
Here you are talking about "warranted" surveillance.
Traffic cameras are warrantless.
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