7 ms·

Funny this article coming from the Guardian which I believe is a British publication. And London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of

Funny this article coming from the Guardian which I believe is a British publication. And London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/ https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

Symbiote 7y ago
The source for the London figure is this article: https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-london/ https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo... Unfortunately, the source for that article costs £100.
saiya-jin 7y ago
I think London is there mainly for the amount of CCTV cameras everywhere. The difference between this and place like China is how these tools are used - British society is fair and democratic to a high degree, in China this was never the goal. Of course priorities might change over time.
detritus 7y ago
My local corner shop has about 16 CCTV cameras in it, covering as many angles in the shop as they can. This is common. Very common. I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves. The oft-regurgitated "x cameras per thousand people" narrative tends to overlook obviousness like this.
- Rooster61 7y ago
  Mind showing me a camera that you can definitively say the government (or other actors) don't have the potential for backdoor access to? I certainly can't.
  - detritus 7y ago
    Nope, and in case of crime, most local police forces can simply walk into local stores and request recordings from the last X days, so quite why they'd need illicit backdoors, I don't know. I'm also entirely fine with this. Backdoors in cheap CCTV being accessed illicitly at a mass-level is an entirely different problem, and one which I'd agree would need questioning. I doubt there's much value in that concern for another decade, until the majority of CCTV cameras are ultra high resolution/30+fps, which they're not.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - i_am_proteus 7y ago
    Any CCTV system that's air-gapped from the internet (records to local storage only) reasonably meets this definition. Yes, there are possible exfil paths, but not ones that can reasonably be executed on a large scale. Realistically, the danger from break-in and hard drive theft (or warrant/subpoena) is greater for the average user.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    Raspberry Pi Camera Module? Unless you believe governments have backdoored SSH, I would say it's good. Definitely not a turnkey solution though.
  - ryandrake 7y ago
    Not to mention camera technology that only records “junkies and thieves” and not the thousands of innocent people going about their day. There is nothing ok about pervasive, constant surveillance of law abiding people.
- yaur 7y ago
  I helped build a product a while back that helped those owners give access to the local police. Depending on what the owner wanted to do this could be just the street cameras or everything.
  - 1996 7y ago
    Do you sleep well at night?
    - dang 7y ago
      No personal attacks please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - 1996 7y ago
        Sorry you see that as personal attack. It is not mean to be directed to one person. It is mostly against the lack of ethics in the profession at large. I can understand less and less how other programmers can do this kind of work. Everyone got to put food on the table, but if the money comes from destroying personal freedom, I could not sleep at night and I would take any other job.
    - yaur 7y ago
      Actually I do. I don't feel bad about writing any legal software. If laws suck they should be changed.
- jammygit 7y ago
  That sort of acceptance is why amazons ring is so dangerous: there are new business models around aggregating and automatically processing and mining that footage
- superkuh 7y ago
  Imagine each one of those cameras were being held by a person. How would you react then? This is the true nature of the situation. Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.
  - mc32 7y ago
    The video on those systems usually is turned over every month. The video isn’t accessed unless there was an event. These systems aren’t integrated into larger systems to help track and ID people. That said, some of this could change if many shops go to nest or ring solutions... but most shop owners will not keep video footage indefinitely in the cloud as it’d be cost prohibitive.
    - superkuh 7y ago
      Yep. That's exactly the kind of rationalization I'm talking about. You don't know any of that for sure for each machine camera and certainly don't know what a random person will do with a taken video.
      - Joe-Z 7y ago
        Amazing how you got downvotes for that. I was just thinking why some people reacted so aggressively towards the guy filming. And tbh he behaves really annoyingly. If he really wanted to teach people a lesson about constant surveillance this certainly doesn't play in his favour. But I think it also has to do with the fact that at least with him people actually have someone to be mad about. As opposed to their usual mode of surveillance where they are being filmed by a 'security' camera (hey, it's security people! nevermind if it doesn't actually make anything any safer) operated and owned probably by their boss or someone who they are not on equal grounds with. It makes me kind of sad.
    - Joe-Z 7y ago
      Do you think the people being filmed would've behaved less aggressively if the camera man had told them that he only keeps footage for a month, doesn't run tracking and ID-ing software on it and only ever re-watches it when there was 'an event'?
- gibolt 7y ago
  Wouldn't be hard to hook them all up to the government's backend, if it one day became mandated. For safety.
sorokod 7y ago
Why would the situation in London influence your perception of the article's content?
whycombagator 7y ago
> London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China Only if you ignore Atlanta, GA at #10.
vkou 7y ago
> And London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv.. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv.... While I've no doubt that London is highly surveilled, that data is, to put it bluntly, horse droppings, and should never be cited. If you look at the sources they cite for stats like "There are 2,985,984 cameras in Shanghai" (Wow, look at the precision on those figures! Six decimal points, if we express it in scientific notation!), you will find that they take a random unsourced number from a blog post from 2013, then add 20% to it 6 times over, because they assume (Also unsourced) 20% year-over-year growth. Meanwhile, that same source claims that there are only 3,600 cameras in San Diego. As anyone who's ever been in a convenience store, bank, airport, or workplace can tell you, that's complete baloney. You can probably visit enough businesses in a normal day that will have you walk past 3,600 cameras. (And the source for that number? A news article about the city government installing 3,000 new intersection cameras. Apparently we are to believe that across all the businesses, government buildings, and private residences of San Diego, there are only 600 cameras.) I'm not sure if the authors in question are just incredibly stupid, or incredibly intellectually dishonest... But my money is on the latter. tl;dr - please think critically about your sources, especially when they reinforce a pre-conception that you hold. Most of the 'data' you can find on the internet is garbage.

Symbiote 7y ago

The source for the London figure is this article: https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-london/ https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo... Unfortunately, the source for that article costs £100.

saiya-jin 7y ago

I think London is there mainly for the amount of CCTV cameras everywhere. The difference between this and place like China is how these tools are used - British society is fair and democratic to a high degree, in China this was never the goal. Of course priorities might change over time.

detritus 7y ago

My local corner shop has about 16 CCTV cameras in it, covering as many angles in the shop as they can. This is common. Very common. I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves. The oft-regurgitated "x cameras per thousand people" narrative tends to overlook obviousness like this.

Rooster61 7y ago
Mind showing me a camera that you can definitively say the government (or other actors) don't have the potential for backdoor access to? I certainly can't.
- detritus 7y ago
  Nope, and in case of crime, most local police forces can simply walk into local stores and request recordings from the last X days, so quite why they'd need illicit backdoors, I don't know. I'm also entirely fine with this. Backdoors in cheap CCTV being accessed illicitly at a mass-level is an entirely different problem, and one which I'd agree would need questioning. I doubt there's much value in that concern for another decade, until the majority of CCTV cameras are ultra high resolution/30+fps, which they're not.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  Any CCTV system that's air-gapped from the internet (records to local storage only) reasonably meets this definition. Yes, there are possible exfil paths, but not ones that can reasonably be executed on a large scale. Realistically, the danger from break-in and hard drive theft (or warrant/subpoena) is greater for the average user.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  Raspberry Pi Camera Module? Unless you believe governments have backdoored SSH, I would say it's good. Definitely not a turnkey solution though.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  Not to mention camera technology that only records “junkies and thieves” and not the thousands of innocent people going about their day. There is nothing ok about pervasive, constant surveillance of law abiding people.
yaur 7y ago
I helped build a product a while back that helped those owners give access to the local police. Depending on what the owner wanted to do this could be just the street cameras or everything.
- 1996 7y ago
  Do you sleep well at night?
  - dang 7y ago
    No personal attacks please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - 1996 7y ago
      Sorry you see that as personal attack. It is not mean to be directed to one person. It is mostly against the lack of ethics in the profession at large. I can understand less and less how other programmers can do this kind of work. Everyone got to put food on the table, but if the money comes from destroying personal freedom, I could not sleep at night and I would take any other job.
  - yaur 7y ago
    Actually I do. I don't feel bad about writing any legal software. If laws suck they should be changed.
jammygit 7y ago
That sort of acceptance is why amazons ring is so dangerous: there are new business models around aggregating and automatically processing and mining that footage
superkuh 7y ago
Imagine each one of those cameras were being held by a person. How would you react then? This is the true nature of the situation. Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.
- mc32 7y ago
  The video on those systems usually is turned over every month. The video isn’t accessed unless there was an event. These systems aren’t integrated into larger systems to help track and ID people. That said, some of this could change if many shops go to nest or ring solutions... but most shop owners will not keep video footage indefinitely in the cloud as it’d be cost prohibitive.
  - superkuh 7y ago
    Yep. That's exactly the kind of rationalization I'm talking about. You don't know any of that for sure for each machine camera and certainly don't know what a random person will do with a taken video.
    - Joe-Z 7y ago
      Amazing how you got downvotes for that. I was just thinking why some people reacted so aggressively towards the guy filming. And tbh he behaves really annoyingly. If he really wanted to teach people a lesson about constant surveillance this certainly doesn't play in his favour. But I think it also has to do with the fact that at least with him people actually have someone to be mad about. As opposed to their usual mode of surveillance where they are being filmed by a 'security' camera (hey, it's security people! nevermind if it doesn't actually make anything any safer) operated and owned probably by their boss or someone who they are not on equal grounds with. It makes me kind of sad.
  - Joe-Z 7y ago
    Do you think the people being filmed would've behaved less aggressively if the camera man had told them that he only keeps footage for a month, doesn't run tracking and ID-ing software on it and only ever re-watches it when there was 'an event'?
gibolt 7y ago
Wouldn't be hard to hook them all up to the government's backend, if it one day became mandated. For safety.

sorokod 7y ago

Why would the situation in London influence your perception of the article's content?

whycombagator 7y ago

> London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China Only if you ignore Atlanta, GA at #10.

vkou 7y ago

> And London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv.. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv.... While I've no doubt that London is highly surveilled, that data is, to put it bluntly, horse droppings, and should never be cited. If you look at the sources they cite for stats like "There are 2,985,984 cameras in Shanghai" (Wow, look at the precision on those figures! Six decimal points, if we express it in scientific notation!), you will find that they take a random unsourced number from a blog post from 2013, then add 20% to it 6 times over, because they assume (Also unsourced) 20% year-over-year growth. Meanwhile, that same source claims that there are only 3,600 cameras in San Diego. As anyone who's ever been in a convenience store, bank, airport, or workplace can tell you, that's complete baloney. You can probably visit enough businesses in a normal day that will have you walk past 3,600 cameras. (And the source for that number? A news article about the city government installing 3,000 new intersection cameras. Apparently we are to believe that across all the businesses, government buildings, and private residences of San Diego, there are only 600 cameras.) I'm not sure if the authors in question are just incredibly stupid, or incredibly intellectually dishonest... But my money is on the latter. tl;dr - please think critically about your sources, especially when they reinforce a pre-conception that you hold. Most of the 'data' you can find on the internet is garbage.