I've recently started seeing a ton of these kinds of cameras with video analytics being deployed in South Africa. The company that is mostly rolling them out, v

I've recently started seeing a ton of these kinds of cameras with video analytics being deployed in South Africa. The company that is mostly rolling them out, vumacam [1], strikes me as quite scary. Because they’re not a government organisation and their business model seems to be selling their camera feeds to private security companies, I wanted to find out specifically who they share video feeds with but they're not totally clear about this besides for saying that they share information with third parties. Does this mean that anyone can claim to be a security company, pay for the feed and get access to video analytics and cameras at every street corner? Even if this is not true, it still looks as if there might be many opportunities for people to abuse the video feed _just_ when legitimate security companies have access. What really worries me though, is whether or not they're running facial recognition on the camera feeds. On their website, they're very open about running automated licences plate recognition and market it as a huge selling point. But in their privacy policy documents they often make reference to collecting data about individuals and vehicles as well as "biometric information" [2]. Plus, if you look under the features section of their website they show screenshots from something called "Milestone" which seems to be the platform they use for video analytics [3] and it seems like there are tons [4] of facial tracking plugins that work on this system. So, it could be totally possible for someone to install face tracking in addition to license plate recognition, whenever they wanted. When I talk to people about the cameras most are so excited about the prospect of them reducing crime that they would happily accept any of the possible effects they might have on their privacy. Which is fair enough, crime is such a huge problem in South Africa that it might be worth taking a hit to our privacy if it means less people get murdered. I think what this means is that in places with high crime rates, it’s going to be very hard to convince people to take their privacy over anything that might tangibly curb crime. For myself, I can’t help but see these cameras as leading to dystopian like futures, which makes me very worried, even if they were to significantly reduce crime. [1] https://www.vumacam.co.za/ https://www.vumacam.co.za/ [2] https://www.vumacam.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/PAIA-Manual-Vumacam-25.10.2018.pdf https://www.vumacam.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/PAIA-Ma... [3] https://www.milestonesys.com/ https://www.milestonesys.com/ [4] https://www.milestonesys.com/solution-finder/ayonix/APS-milestone-face-recognition-plugin/ https://www.milestonesys.com/solution-finder/ayonix/APS-mile...