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A Billion Surveillance Cameras Forecast to Be Watching Within Two Years
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/FFpgV http://archive.is/FFpgV
- peter303 7y agoWho will interpret the 9 trillion hours of resulting video then? Every person in the world would have to spending three work shifts a week watching and evaluating it.
- piracy1 7y agoTHE MACHINES. See:China. It will all be tied into an increasingly centralized system and we will be taken into cybernetic hell or utopia depending on the controller(s) intention(s) or maybe regardless of them. True story.
- corporateslave5 7y agoComputer vision systems will tear through this video like it’s nothing
- imtringued 7y agoIt's not the 70s anymore. China has invested a lot in facial recognition and as soon as your face appears on the camera it will be tagged and your location at that time will be stored in a database.
- tehlike 7y agoSome of the computation will move to the edge others will be centralized on cloud.
- Wordball 7y agois this bait
- nitwit005 7y agoMany (most?) of the cameras out there only have the recordings looked at if a crime is reported, some motion sensor is tripped, or some other condition. A friend of mine opened a business, and he was required to have a security camera to make things convenient for the police. The law specified VHS as no one had bothered to update it, but he just burned them a DVD the one time they asked for a recording.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThese are not a real problem. The bigger threat is automated facial recognition throwing false positives and having swat teams mow down innocent people because a computer said they were criminals.
- kirykl 7y agoDon't worry, automated swat teams will eliminate the need to mow down, merely resulting in arrests
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoYou don't even need false positives. Just identifying more people who have warrants out will cause innocent people to die. Every time an AI gets a hit and calls the police the public is at risk. The police are simply not professional enough to be expected to rush into a situation where they have no knowledge other than there's someone there they want to arrest and not have an unacceptably high chance of leaving death and destruction in their wake. Calling the cops more because we have AI doing it will result in more death regardless of the accuracy of the AI. If cops could be trusted to show restraint swatting wouldn't be a thing.
- Scoundreller 7y agoWho needs to mow them down? Getting denied a credit card, product returns, plane tickets or FAANG accounts will be bad enough, but permitted because “nobody has a reasonable expectation of those”.
- heavyset_go 7y agoIf you look at other surveillance states, most of it will be automated, and for populations you truly want to repress, an actual person will watch their video feeds.
- Scoundreller 7y agoOver 99% of my dashcam footage goes unreviewed. But that last 0.1% or so might really come in handy.
- gaahrdner 7y agoNobody can watch all these, I don't get it.
- hndamien 7y agoThe trick is that you don't have to watch it for the data to be useful.
- ablation 7y agoI doubt they will be watched by people. Most likely, algorithms.
- colecut 7y agoVideoAI, give me the names of every face seen within X blocks of [riot, business, person of interest's home] between Y time and Z time.
- tehlike 7y agoProximityai, give me the names of people who were in the x blocks between y and z time using WiFi and cell connectivity.
- AndrewBissell 7y agoAt least with Proximityai, you don't show up if you leave your cell phone at home when you go to a protest.
- joejerryronnie 7y agoWhat if everyone just starts wearing masks?
- hjkhtroeiupwq 7y agoIt's inevitable that in 20 years every living person on this planet will have it's location tracked in real-time. All kinds of crime will become impossible. Today the police doesn't have resources to spend on stolen packages, bikes or small time muggings. But with permanent tracking and AI it will be trivial to backtrack any interaction. And it will be impossible to disable the tracking. Even if you don't have any tracking on you, unless you are literally invisible you'll be tracked through millions of other peoples cameras each day. Something like Google Street View, but in real time will also exist.
- thephyber 7y ago> All kinds of crime will become impossible This will never be the case. The constraints are currently on the resources available for police to find the suspect. While prolific surveillance will make finding the X "persons of interest" easier + faster + more reliable, the constraint would then be on identifying other evidence and the court/prosecutor system to process plea bargaining and/or jury trials. Additionally, jails and the resources concerned with jailing are very expensive (VERY large outlays and high upkeep) in the current high-cash-bail environment.
- philipkglass 7y agoIt's possible that a high enforcement rate with diminished penalties would be more effective than the current approach of rare enforcement and harsh penalties. Hardly anyone thinks that it's "worth it" to pay a fine for dumping trash on the side of the road. Dumpers just assume -- cynically but correctly -- that the chances of being caught are negligible at present. Or for another example, consider people who don't come to a complete stop before making a turn unless they know that the intersection has a camera. They're not incapable of following the rules of the road, or undeterred by penalties. They're just not going to follow the rules unless the rules are consistently enforced.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago> Hardly anyone thinks that it's "worth it" to pay a fine for dumping trash on the side of the road. Dumpers just assume -- cynically but correctly -- that the chances of being caught are negligible at present. I know it's not the point you were trying to make but people dump trash because it's easier/cheaper than getting rid of it the "right way". Where I grew up there was one scrap place that only took non-ferrous metals and the towns all charged $20-$50 to dispose of it at the dump (scrap metal is usually something you get paid for, not pay to get rid of). Likewise washing machines and refrigerators and whatnot adorned highway rest stops and the ends of dead end roads. Then a real scrap place that took ferrous metals opened up and not only did the existing dumped stuff vanish but you never saw one again. Point is that there's a class of petty crimes that are like video piracy, people wouldn't do it if the "right" thing was cheap and convenient enough.
- tehjoker 7y agoDamn, when I read 1984 I was like what a sweet tech setup Winston has in his pad. What a modern city! So blessed to be living in an era of unimpeded technology deployed for our benefit.
- SkyMarshal 7y agoI've come to accept the notion of no privacy in public spaces, as long as individuals retain the right to surveil everything too, and to publicly release our videos about police misbehavior and everything else we catch on camera. The balance of surveillance power between government, corporations, and the public must be maintained.
- AndrewBissell 7y ago"Public spaces" are where the hoi polloi live and occasionally commit crimes. It's deluded to think persistent surveillance of them by individuals represents some kind of rough balance of power with government & corporations.
- ummonk 7y agoI'm pretty sure most people live in private dwellings.
- ghostly_s 7y agoDo you ever leave your private dwelling? Are you not "living" when you do so?
- anigbrowl 7y agoWealthy and powerful people tend not to walk the streets in the same way as regular folk, in much the same way they don't do their own grocery shopping or stand in line to buy movie tickets.
- matz1 7y agoPrivacy or not, wealthy and powerful people by definition do not live the same way as regular people. They always have advantage over regular people.
- mercoles 7y agoThe "I have nothing to hide" defense of public or private space is great unless you are on the run from domestic or other types of violence. Then, you will want the right not just to be forgotten, but to be hidden.
- alexcnwy 7y agoI gave a talk on "Deep Neural Networks for Video Applications" at the GDG DevFest conference last weekend [1]. It's crazy how powerful computer vision is and how relatively easy it is to apply to video streams. It's not perfect but you can absolutely replace a human watching video in most situations / use cases, for example: * identifying vehicles & reading license plates * identifying people and tracking them across cameras * identifying products on the back of trucks * counting people in queues or getting in/out of vehicles / stores * detecting suspicious activity / shoplifting Generally you don't even need to completely eliminate humans watching footage, you can just present the human with cases detected by the object and let the human decide whether it's a true positive / what to do. It's scary but useful technology because there's no way humans can watch all the footage being produced by a billion cameras... [1] https://speakerdeck.com/alxcnwy/gdg-devfest-2019-deep-neural-networks-for-video-applications https://speakerdeck.com/alxcnwy/gdg-devfest-2019-deep-neural...
- MisterOctober 7y agoStrongly reminds me of "A Scanner Darkly" [the movie, at least] -- where the human scanners have to watch thousands of hours of surveillance video [which they do at increased speed until they spot something notable]
- boiler_up800 7y agoI disagree that identifying people and tracking them across cameras works well. If you have high res cameras and facial recognition then maybe.
- alexcnwy 7y agoYeah sufficient resolution is definitely an issue. I'm not suggesting you can use models in all situations or an all current setups, just that it's possible (and surprisingly easy) to use models to automate a lot of analysis on video. A lot of current commodity $100 cameras are good enough resolution for many use cases but of course you do need sufficiently high res video and good enough lighting conditions. You also don't necessarily need to do facial recognition to track people. I'm nervous of the privacy implications of all this surveillance tech but it's possible to do useful tracking (e.g. I've worked on a project counting people to prevent over-filling busses which is a big issue in Africa) without needing to use facial recognition. In the counting case, you don't need to recognize people to count them and can do edge computing on quite low resolution video so that the raw footage never leaves the device (only computed count statistics).
- annoyingnoob 7y agoWill it look like this? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Building_covered_in_eyes_in_Barcelona%2C_Spain.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Building...
- wallflower 7y ago> He was holding a small device in his hand, the size and shape of a lollipop. "This is a video camera, and this is the precise model that's getting this incredible image quality. Image quality that holds up to this kind of magnification. So that's the first great thing. We can now get high-def-quality resolution in a camera the size of a thumb." ... "But for now, let's go back to the places in the world where we most need transparency and so rarely have it. Here's a medley of locations around the world where we've placed cameras. Now imagine the impact these cameras would have had in the past, and will have in the future, if similar events transpire. Here's fifty cameras in Tiananmen Square." ... "There needs to be accountability. Tyrants can no longer hide. There needs to be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear witness." ... ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN -From "The Circle" by David Eggers
- travisgriggs 7y agoI'm actually OK with this future. I think it's inevitable. But what to me is the choice of whether the cameras watch everyone, or just certain classes of someone. There was a scifi novel many years ago, forget the name, where everyone's glasses were constantly live feeds. The author posited that crime went down, but also transparency amongst the powerful/elite climbed as well.
- aeternum 7y agoThe powerful/elite can simply avoid public places and deal behind closed doors. Seems unlikely that it will increase transparency amongst that group.
- badrabbit 7y agoGuys, here's a wild idea: let's have more cameras owned by individuals which will be used to track specifically politicians and law enforcement officials. Use facial recognition and gait analysis to identify them and analyze their mood,associations,behaviors,etc... Use high DPI long range cams where possible. Ask people to share their ring,etc... I just don't know how to scare society enough. Maybe use this techs explicitly against specific demographics. Abuse it against democrats and republicans. Track and publish analysis of every trump supporter, bernie sanders supporter,minorities, I don't know just hit everyones sensitive sweet spots to show them "we can do this legally!!" Because the people that will profit from this will certainly not make their practice public enough to be visible by lawmakers and society at large. The tech is moving magnitudes faster than the law. Essentially use it against them in a very hostile way to force them to take this seriously.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ramshorns 7y agoAs a side effect this might cause people who care about privacy to never run for office.
- petre 7y agoIf you care about privacy you don't run for office anyway. Nosy journalists and opponents will look into your history and watch your every move once you do.
- bamboozled 7y agoWhat do you expect the average person to do about it? In the end we have psychopaths owning democracy and until this is resolved (which it might never be) expect more of the same. I like your idea about surveillance of the surveillance, I’m sure there are already millions of places this happens. Imagine what Google knows about Trump?
- badrabbit 7y ago
- ErikAugust 7y agohttps://beta.trimread.com/articles/589 https://beta.trimread.com/articles/589
- Taniwha 7y agoGreat news for me! here in NZ art performance of any kind is protected and may not be recorded without an appropriate license. I've publicly declared the rest of my life to be "performance art" and look forward to a continuing stream of license income from people who have illegally recorded my performance without permission .....
- jonny383 7y agoOn the subject of tracking, does anybody know of any current -on-the-market- security cameras that also do passive air / radio sniffing on things like WiFi and Bluetooth? Imagine an appliance brick and mortar shop that gives users free WiFi. In the middle of the night, masked intruders burgle the place and steal $50,000 worth of goods. In addition to logging the (fairly useless) footage of masked people stealing stuff in the dark, the system also recorded some Bluetooth / WiFi beacons. If sufficient "fingerprinting" information can be collected from this data, it could become possible to look backwards for clues to who these users were in earlier collected data (say for example, when the assailants had previously scouted the store during the daytime making a plan).
- chatmasta 7y agoThis exact scenario happened in July: https://gizmodo.com/automatic-wifi-login-helped-police-id-teens-who-vandali-1836249333 https://gizmodo.com/automatic-wifi-login-helped-police-id-te...
- notjtrig 7y agoWouldn’t that be the most amazing and scary hardware security startup, I briefly looked into adding that capability to my security system but didn’t find anything. I know mall some clothing stores have had that tech for years, for marketing purposes.
- jliptzin 7y agoJust a game of cat and mouse, if that kind of thing became widespread, crooks would just leave their electronics at home while casing a potential site.
- tehlike 7y agoMost of the criminals are not _that_ careful. Among a group of 5, one might forget or have a reason to hide his phone from others because his child is sick and he is expecting a call, for example.
- 7y ago
- mindfulhack 7y agoI think people's freedoms and rights are going to live on through social and legal regulation, not banning or countering surveillance technology itself. E.g. with an existing technology known as firearms, it's not socially 'OK' or legal to just go up and randomly shoot someone with such technology, but technically you could do it, if you really wanted. There's consequences to it though. So we need consequences for violating people's privacy or using their information in a way that is abusive or unfair to their human rights. Radical transparency of disclosure such as what insurance companies know about you that they feed into their business will have to be legally mandated. (How about an open-source algorithm too?) We will need new frameworks by which data collected on you and used against you MUST be disclosed, because otherwise it could be total abuse and fake. We know China is already in that territory. The world of deepfakes is going to make 'deniability' a major opposing force of surveillance as well. We have an interesting future ahead of us.
- mesofile 7y agoWhat would be great is if judiciaries only treated video as admissible if it was cryptographically watermarked in tandem with a globally distributed blockchain-style rolling checksum, to resist tampering (deepfakes or just plain old timecode manipulation). Combine that with a licensing scheme, as a condition of using the global checksum service, that guaranteed by law access to video by any party captured on said video — i.e. scenes & events in public areas would be required to be made available to members of the public, on request; or video of private areas would still have to be shared with any subjects that it captured, if it were to be introduced as evidence.
- Ajedi32 7y agoTimestamping doesn't prevent fakes, it just means you have to create the fakes ahead of time instead of being able to generate them retroactively.
- jointpdf 7y agoSo I’ve had this (perhaps naive and not novel?) idea for a while and am curious what people think. What if it were required by law that all surveillance video is “anonymized” in real-time via computer vision software? In other words, use an image segmentation model like Mask R-CNN to cut out or blur each person appearing in frame. Violent/criminal behavior can still be detected in real-time either via software or by human operators (you don’t need to see someone’s face or skin color to determine if they’re e.g. committing a violent act). If a crime is committed and the video is needed as evidence or for identifying the person(s), then the archived video can be “unmasked” via court order or other process. There is some precedent for this, relating to when US citizens incidentally appear in foreign phone calls collected by intelligence agencies (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmasking_by_U.S._intelligence_agencies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmasking_by_U.S._intelligen...). This way, there is a reasonable level of privacy preservation (=anxiety reduction) for people innocently going about their lives. It also limits opportunities for abuse, like stalking and discrimination. The effectiveness of surveillance systems as a crime deterrent and source of evidence is still maintained under this policy. That is, it’s basically a Pareto improvement—no one is made worse off, while many are better off.
- rapnie 7y agoCheck DeepPrivacy, a project that does automatic face anonymization. https://github.com/hukkelas/DeepPrivacy https://github.com/hukkelas/DeepPrivacy
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoSo the number of cameras will increase 30% by the end of 2021, the rate of population growth is 1.08%. if we can keep this up it won't be long before we have as many cameras as people, however, and here's the kicker, since the cameras are tied to locations and not to people it means that not every person will be under constant surveillance! Surely some intrepid politician will see how unsustainable and just plain wasteful such a situation is and, in cooperation with some tech company, push for the development of some sort of mobile monitoring solution tied to every human being.
- marmaduke 7y ago> mobile monitoring solution tied to every human being Like a, um, handheld, networked device required for modern lifestyle and work, backed by major corporations like Google and Apple?
- bryanrasmussen 7y agohey, that's a great idea! if only every one had one of those we would be well on our way to a more sustainable surveillance state!