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I find it extremely creepy to visit the UK because of all the cameras, sometimes actively pointed at me. It is one thing to not expect privacy in the public spa

I find it extremely creepy to visit the UK because of all the cameras, sometimes actively pointed at me. It is one thing to not expect privacy in the public space, in the sense that others can see you. It is another to be actively targeted by a gigantic network of cameras connected to who knows what -- in an age where automatic face recognition is becoming trivial. I would like to ask people who make the "you have no expectation of privacy in the public space" claim if they wouldn't mind if I hired a guy to follow them everywhere they go and then report to me. In the end, I am aware that this is a losing battle, and that people who feel as strongly as me about not being constantly under surveillance will have to move out of big cities. Big cities are becoming highly controlled environment, where one doesn't feel like a sovereign human being anymore. In a sense they are an externalisation of corporate culture.

ciaranm 10y ago
I agree with the parent r.e. safety concerns though. It's a cheap, easy way to provide a relatively sure record of truth for public spaces. It helps prosecute people who enact violent or other crimes, and reduces the number of those in the first place. Do you disagree with that, or value being invisible in public higher?
- dumb-saint 10y ago
  I agree that more authoritarianism leads to less crimes. This is a well-known fact. But at what cost? Historically, we have been through all this before. Notice that it's never just the cameras. You also have to make it illegal for me to hide from them. No face camouflage, for example. And even if you don't make it illegal, you will immediately single me out and pay close attention to me. Not in the old sense of having some police officers "keeping an eye on me" but in the new sense of using the full power of all of our current technology to track me. I'll tell you what the cost is: spontaneity, randomness, street-level interaction, the right to be WEIRD. All this while crime rates have been naturally going down for decades. None of this stuff is about crime for the politicians, it's about control and business deals (I promise you someone sells all those cameras and related equipment to the cities, and it's not you or me). I am not that old, but old enough to already see that historical lessons don't last long, and everything has to be learned over and over again :(
  - ciaranm 10y ago
    Lots of CCTV isn't government-run. Some is, like local parks or whatever, but most is run by businesses who want to be able to catch folks who have broken in. In order to get access to the footage, police generally need a warrant. I guess I disagree that "camera == authoritarian", but I totally get your concerns. I'd be more worried about the secret courts(US) and super-injunctions(England) that mean we can't talk about things, than I would about being on camera.
    - dumb-saint 10y ago
      I have no problem with businesses having CCTV inside their premises -- as long as this is clearly advertised, so that I can decide if I'm ok with it or not. But I don't think they have the right to point the camera to the public space outside and film me without my consent. Cameras are a tool of authoritarianism because they tell you in no uncertain terms that someone is watching. Pointing a camera at a space changes how people behave in it. There is no way around it. Maybe you don't value what they destroy, but it is hard to deny that something is destroyed. Imagine kids playing. Do you think they behave the same when no adults are watching? And do you think it is good for mental health to have zero "unsupervised" time? And then, let's not be naive. After Snowden we know that the reach of the government knows no bounds. Every private camera is potentially public. Everything that is recorded is potentially recorded forever, and sifted through by increasingly powerful algorithms. In this realty, one less camera is always a little bit more freedom for everyone -- to do both good and bad things, of course, but I would rather live like a free adult than as a constantly supervised child, always submissive to Society with a big S.
      - Ntrails 10y ago
        >Cameras are a tool of authoritarianism because they tell you in no uncertain terms that someone is watching. Pointing a camera at a space changes how people behave in it. 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? 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. Now if you want to straw man and say "well they can make anything illegal and use the cameras against you" - well sure. Come back to me when they do that, until then I'll keep enjoying lower crime rates.
- romaniv 10y ago
  Meta-study: http://www.popcenter.org/Responses/video_surveillance/PDFs/Welsh%26Farrington_2002.pdf http://www.popcenter.org/Responses/video_surveillance/PDFs/W... TLDR: The value and effects of CCTV cameras are very much context-dependent. Also, nearly half of the research in this are was deemed too unreliable by the authors.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Regarding automatic face recognition: I believe most US/European citizens, at least those who travel on airplanes, are in the facial recognition corpus of the intelligence services by now. What they do (I'm guessing) is use the cameras at passport checkpoints in airports. There they get many thousands of frames of your face from various angles, and due to the strict ordering in the queue they can match all those to your ID when your passport is scanned/entered into the computer.
- dumb-saint 10y ago
  Yes, I think modern airports are a good prototype for the sort of dystopian environments we can expect in the future. It will only get worse until the entire thing collapses, as it always does -- Stasi, McCarthyism, Gestapo, you name it. This time it's more scary because the technology is sci-fi compared to the previous iterations. I am more and more convinced that the cyberpunk guys got it right in terms of predicting future trends :(
  - pdimitar 10y ago
    [Apologies for off-topic] As a relatively new cyberpunk fan, let me give you a few points: (1) Cyberpunk is very much about being realistic about human nature. Some of us (like me) assume malice by default. You might not believe me but I get saddened every time I am proven right. This is coming from a 36-year old programmer supporting his mother and girlfriend. (2) We don't assume altruism by default because (2.1) history is [mostly] not on the side of this sentiment and (2.2) we are touched by ambition and greed ourselves and we realize that we could become just as bad (if not worse) given the same power as the current spy agencies / corporate hires / whatever else. (3) We understand that "pure capitalism" and "corporatism" leads to the 0.5% having 95% of the capital, assets and anything else valuable. So when you see a dark art piece on DeviantArt showing people miserable on the streets while a high-tech shiny vehicle surrounded by police-men passes by, and a few huge adverts are glowing in the background, don't be quick to say "2edgy4me". ;) (4) We also know technology is seen as a way of gaining an unfair advantage over everybody else -- and most of the time technology is not used to the majority's advantage. If somebody invents AI by themselves, do you think they'll just share it with the world? LOL no. The "Transcedence" movie script is the most likely scenario -- the AI becomes sentient, escapes to the internet to evade attackers, and then talks to you through a smartphone or a tablet. === The general cyberpunk audience is wide and interesting but it mostly boils down to two types: (1) Rebelious teenagers who would give everything just to prove the bad adults that if their thoughts and feelings are ignored, the world is gonna go to shit (and to be fair, they might have a point). Some of them are toxic, some are not -- but they're mostly an okay bunch. Still, I give them kudos for going outside the typical teenager boxes. Getting engaged in cyberpunk fandom consciously implies some level of critical thinking, IMO. (2) A group of rather dark-souled adults who stopped believing in the "bright future" a long time ago. Again, we're touched by greed and ambition ourselves, we're very conscious about the balance of power around the world and we don't kid ourselves. I hope this helps you understand the cyberpunk bunch a bit. EDIT: As mentioned by @Fnoord a few comments below, "Ghost in the Shell" is your absolute Bible of a starting place in the cyberpunk genre. The anime movies and the series touch on a plethora of problems that don't even exist yet but are extremely likely to exist pretty soon. And they are a masterpiece in exposing the corruption which all of us would be vulnerable to. Order of watching: http://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/2922/in-what-order-should-i-watch-the-ghost-in-the-shell-series http://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/2922/in-what-order-...
kamjam 10y ago
I've never understood this "UK is creepy cos of all the cameras they have". Yes, there are a lot of them in the built up cities, most are privately owned and a lot are probably directly controlled by the government (and related agencies as well). The large paranoia towards the UK probably stems from "The UK has more CCTV cameras per person than anywhere else in the world" but no ones knows this to be true for certain[1][2]. It may well be true, but don't think that you're being filmed any less in any other first world country. Also worth noting that most of the statistics are based on "per person". There may well be countries with a much higher population and much higher CTTV camera count. 1. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cctv_cameras_per_capita https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cctv_cameras_per_capi... 2. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/spy-britain-six-million-cctv-cameras-and-most-are-in-private-hands-8699934.html http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/spy-britain-six-million-cc...
- dumb-saint 10y ago
  > It may well be true, but don't think that you're being filmed any less in any other first world country. In Germany there are strong laws against CCTV proliferation. They exist mostly in public transportation, and their presence has to be clearly advertised. You can even order Google to blur your house on street view. Try it in a German city, and you will see how common it is. And yet, Germany is one of the safest countries in the world.
  - eximius 10y ago
    I think Germany being safe is a result of culture, not anything with cameras. Many, many modern problems are fundamentally cultural issues and things like CCTV cameras are either masking or exhibiting their symptoms.
- certifiedloud 10y ago
  Wouldn't cameras-per-person be a more meaningful metric in this context than total count?
rebuilder 10y ago
Here's a terrific-terrible idea: let's create an open network of surveillance cameras with facial recognition. Permanent logs, free access to all, an easy search function, plot all events on a map with timestamps. Should kick up a storm.
- dumb-saint 10y ago
  That is a great idea, but it will not work. People will say that only the government and big corporations can be trusted with that data, because of reasons.
  - 13of40 10y ago
    I think it's a terrible idea. If I decide to call in sick and go lamp shopping, there's a vast difference between the FBI or Google being able to track me, with some effort, and my boss being able to idly hit a web page and see where I am. At the end of the day most of us are hiding trivial, below-the-radar infidelities, not dragging dismembered bodies around in suitcases or plotting revolutions.
- sjg007 10y ago
  You could probably take geo located timestamp Facebook / instagram / snapchat and get a similar result.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
morgante 10y ago
> I would like to ask people who make the "you have no expectation of privacy in the public space" claim if they wouldn't mind if I hired a guy to follow them everywhere they go and then report to me. I wouldn't mind. My life is divided into public and private spheres. If you try to invade my private space (spy inside my home, ban encryption, etc.) then you will have rigorous pushback. My public life is public and open to inspection. I'll gladly provide you with a list of everywhere I ever go if you like.
confounded 10y ago
I entirely sympathize. Over time, I've gradually come to the same conclusion as Bruce Schneier in Data and Goliath: regulation and legislation are the only way to make sure that surveillance works in the interests of the people, not against them. It should be possible for a society to decide what its surveillance is and is not used for. The problem that we currently have in the US and the UK is that there is a total breakdown of trust between the state and the citizenry. The government does not trust the people it obstensibly serves, and lies to them. Many people generally are apathetic and disorganized (proud individualists). It's the latter part that means that decisions are likely to go against the interests of the population, and this problem extends well beyond surveillance. I should have originally mentioned, it's possible for CCTV -- without good legislation -- to have almost no utility for individuals. This is what the linked article demonstrates; corporate surveillance protects corporate interests. All this said, I remain optimistic about the prospect for change. 2016 beat the political apathy out of me.

ciaranm 10y ago

I agree with the parent r.e. safety concerns though. It's a cheap, easy way to provide a relatively sure record of truth for public spaces. It helps prosecute people who enact violent or other crimes, and reduces the number of those in the first place. Do you disagree with that, or value being invisible in public higher?

dumb-saint 10y ago
I agree that more authoritarianism leads to less crimes. This is a well-known fact. But at what cost? Historically, we have been through all this before. Notice that it's never just the cameras. You also have to make it illegal for me to hide from them. No face camouflage, for example. And even if you don't make it illegal, you will immediately single me out and pay close attention to me. Not in the old sense of having some police officers "keeping an eye on me" but in the new sense of using the full power of all of our current technology to track me. I'll tell you what the cost is: spontaneity, randomness, street-level interaction, the right to be WEIRD. All this while crime rates have been naturally going down for decades. None of this stuff is about crime for the politicians, it's about control and business deals (I promise you someone sells all those cameras and related equipment to the cities, and it's not you or me). I am not that old, but old enough to already see that historical lessons don't last long, and everything has to be learned over and over again :(
- ciaranm 10y ago
  Lots of CCTV isn't government-run. Some is, like local parks or whatever, but most is run by businesses who want to be able to catch folks who have broken in. In order to get access to the footage, police generally need a warrant. I guess I disagree that "camera == authoritarian", but I totally get your concerns. I'd be more worried about the secret courts(US) and super-injunctions(England) that mean we can't talk about things, than I would about being on camera.
  - dumb-saint 10y ago
    I have no problem with businesses having CCTV inside their premises -- as long as this is clearly advertised, so that I can decide if I'm ok with it or not. But I don't think they have the right to point the camera to the public space outside and film me without my consent. Cameras are a tool of authoritarianism because they tell you in no uncertain terms that someone is watching. Pointing a camera at a space changes how people behave in it. There is no way around it. Maybe you don't value what they destroy, but it is hard to deny that something is destroyed. Imagine kids playing. Do you think they behave the same when no adults are watching? And do you think it is good for mental health to have zero "unsupervised" time? And then, let's not be naive. After Snowden we know that the reach of the government knows no bounds. Every private camera is potentially public. Everything that is recorded is potentially recorded forever, and sifted through by increasingly powerful algorithms. In this realty, one less camera is always a little bit more freedom for everyone -- to do both good and bad things, of course, but I would rather live like a free adult than as a constantly supervised child, always submissive to Society with a big S.
    - Ntrails 10y ago
      >Cameras are a tool of authoritarianism because they tell you in no uncertain terms that someone is watching. Pointing a camera at a space changes how people behave in it. 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? 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. Now if you want to straw man and say "well they can make anything illegal and use the cameras against you" - well sure. Come back to me when they do that, until then I'll keep enjoying lower crime rates.
romaniv 10y ago
Meta-study: http://www.popcenter.org/Responses/video_surveillance/PDFs/Welsh%26Farrington_2002.pdf http://www.popcenter.org/Responses/video_surveillance/PDFs/W... TLDR: The value and effects of CCTV cameras are very much context-dependent. Also, nearly half of the research in this are was deemed too unreliable by the authors.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

Regarding automatic face recognition: I believe most US/European citizens, at least those who travel on airplanes, are in the facial recognition corpus of the intelligence services by now. What they do (I'm guessing) is use the cameras at passport checkpoints in airports. There they get many thousands of frames of your face from various angles, and due to the strict ordering in the queue they can match all those to your ID when your passport is scanned/entered into the computer.

dumb-saint 10y ago
Yes, I think modern airports are a good prototype for the sort of dystopian environments we can expect in the future. It will only get worse until the entire thing collapses, as it always does -- Stasi, McCarthyism, Gestapo, you name it. This time it's more scary because the technology is sci-fi compared to the previous iterations. I am more and more convinced that the cyberpunk guys got it right in terms of predicting future trends :(
- pdimitar 10y ago
  [Apologies for off-topic] As a relatively new cyberpunk fan, let me give you a few points: (1) Cyberpunk is very much about being realistic about human nature. Some of us (like me) assume malice by default. You might not believe me but I get saddened every time I am proven right. This is coming from a 36-year old programmer supporting his mother and girlfriend. (2) We don't assume altruism by default because (2.1) history is [mostly] not on the side of this sentiment and (2.2) we are touched by ambition and greed ourselves and we realize that we could become just as bad (if not worse) given the same power as the current spy agencies / corporate hires / whatever else. (3) We understand that "pure capitalism" and "corporatism" leads to the 0.5% having 95% of the capital, assets and anything else valuable. So when you see a dark art piece on DeviantArt showing people miserable on the streets while a high-tech shiny vehicle surrounded by police-men passes by, and a few huge adverts are glowing in the background, don't be quick to say "2edgy4me". ;) (4) We also know technology is seen as a way of gaining an unfair advantage over everybody else -- and most of the time technology is not used to the majority's advantage. If somebody invents AI by themselves, do you think they'll just share it with the world? LOL no. The "Transcedence" movie script is the most likely scenario -- the AI becomes sentient, escapes to the internet to evade attackers, and then talks to you through a smartphone or a tablet. === The general cyberpunk audience is wide and interesting but it mostly boils down to two types: (1) Rebelious teenagers who would give everything just to prove the bad adults that if their thoughts and feelings are ignored, the world is gonna go to shit (and to be fair, they might have a point). Some of them are toxic, some are not -- but they're mostly an okay bunch. Still, I give them kudos for going outside the typical teenager boxes. Getting engaged in cyberpunk fandom consciously implies some level of critical thinking, IMO. (2) A group of rather dark-souled adults who stopped believing in the "bright future" a long time ago. Again, we're touched by greed and ambition ourselves, we're very conscious about the balance of power around the world and we don't kid ourselves. I hope this helps you understand the cyberpunk bunch a bit. EDIT: As mentioned by @Fnoord a few comments below, "Ghost in the Shell" is your absolute Bible of a starting place in the cyberpunk genre. The anime movies and the series touch on a plethora of problems that don't even exist yet but are extremely likely to exist pretty soon. And they are a masterpiece in exposing the corruption which all of us would be vulnerable to. Order of watching: http://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/2922/in-what-order-should-i-watch-the-ghost-in-the-shell-series http://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/2922/in-what-order-...

kamjam 10y ago

I've never understood this "UK is creepy cos of all the cameras they have". Yes, there are a lot of them in the built up cities, most are privately owned and a lot are probably directly controlled by the government (and related agencies as well). The large paranoia towards the UK probably stems from "The UK has more CCTV cameras per person than anywhere else in the world" but no ones knows this to be true for certain[1][2]. It may well be true, but don't think that you're being filmed any less in any other first world country. Also worth noting that most of the statistics are based on "per person". There may well be countries with a much higher population and much higher CTTV camera count. 1. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cctv_cameras_per_capita https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cctv_cameras_per_capi... 2. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/spy-britain-six-million-cctv-cameras-and-most-are-in-private-hands-8699934.html http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/spy-britain-six-million-cc...

dumb-saint 10y ago
> It may well be true, but don't think that you're being filmed any less in any other first world country. In Germany there are strong laws against CCTV proliferation. They exist mostly in public transportation, and their presence has to be clearly advertised. You can even order Google to blur your house on street view. Try it in a German city, and you will see how common it is. And yet, Germany is one of the safest countries in the world.
- eximius 10y ago
  I think Germany being safe is a result of culture, not anything with cameras. Many, many modern problems are fundamentally cultural issues and things like CCTV cameras are either masking or exhibiting their symptoms.
certifiedloud 10y ago
Wouldn't cameras-per-person be a more meaningful metric in this context than total count?

rebuilder 10y ago

Here's a terrific-terrible idea: let's create an open network of surveillance cameras with facial recognition. Permanent logs, free access to all, an easy search function, plot all events on a map with timestamps. Should kick up a storm.

dumb-saint 10y ago
That is a great idea, but it will not work. People will say that only the government and big corporations can be trusted with that data, because of reasons.
- 13of40 10y ago
  I think it's a terrible idea. If I decide to call in sick and go lamp shopping, there's a vast difference between the FBI or Google being able to track me, with some effort, and my boss being able to idly hit a web page and see where I am. At the end of the day most of us are hiding trivial, below-the-radar infidelities, not dragging dismembered bodies around in suitcases or plotting revolutions.
sjg007 10y ago
You could probably take geo located timestamp Facebook / instagram / snapchat and get a similar result.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

morgante 10y ago

> I would like to ask people who make the "you have no expectation of privacy in the public space" claim if they wouldn't mind if I hired a guy to follow them everywhere they go and then report to me. I wouldn't mind. My life is divided into public and private spheres. If you try to invade my private space (spy inside my home, ban encryption, etc.) then you will have rigorous pushback. My public life is public and open to inspection. I'll gladly provide you with a list of everywhere I ever go if you like.

confounded 10y ago

I entirely sympathize. Over time, I've gradually come to the same conclusion as Bruce Schneier in Data and Goliath: regulation and legislation are the only way to make sure that surveillance works in the interests of the people, not against them. It should be possible for a society to decide what its surveillance is and is not used for. The problem that we currently have in the US and the UK is that there is a total breakdown of trust between the state and the citizenry. The government does not trust the people it obstensibly serves, and lies to them. Many people generally are apathetic and disorganized (proud individualists). It's the latter part that means that decisions are likely to go against the interests of the population, and this problem extends well beyond surveillance. I should have originally mentioned, it's possible for CCTV -- without good legislation -- to have almost no utility for individuals. This is what the linked article demonstrates; corporate surveillance protects corporate interests. All this said, I remain optimistic about the prospect for change. 2016 beat the political apathy out of me.