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The UK is one of the most surveilled countries in the world. Growing up in the 90s I began to see cameras appear in public spaces. By the time I emigrated to Ca

The UK is one of the most surveilled countries in the world. Growing up in the 90s I began to see cameras appear in public spaces. By the time I emigrated to Canada you could basically be tracked from town to city, cameras on the street, on public transit, and on the motorways. In Canada I rarely see any evidence of surveillance outside of the cities. Public transit being the exception.

mayniac 7y ago
I'm probably slightly younger than you, and I barely notice the CCTV cameras anymore. Weirdly, the one time I genuinely felt uncomfortable was last week. I saw a traffic camera* swivel across a junction. Actually seeing a camera move in such a way that it was clearly being operated by a human was genuinely unnerving. I took a wrong turn so it wouldn't see me, for no real reason. *One of these things: https://d1ix0byejyn2u7.cloudfront.net/drive/images/uploads/panel-images/Traffic_camera.jpg https://d1ix0byejyn2u7.cloudfront.net/drive/images/uploads/p...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dewote 7y ago
  There is something about seeing any kind of surveillance camera move that unnerves me. At least here in Northern Ireland the traffic cameras can be viewed by the public with either a live video feed or regularly updating images.
- pbalau 7y ago
  > I barely notice the CCTV cameras anymore Maybe because, as most UK citizens (at least the ones I've spoke to about this), you know that most non traffic cameras are not under police control, but under the control of the establishment that installed them, bars, pubs, stadiums, office buildings etc and the police has to provide a good enough reason, via a warrant, to actually see the footage. There is also the matter of logistics, to connect every camera in say, London, to a central location to process the data, you would need a crapload of infra that doesn't exists at the moment. Not to mention how much processing power you would need to use this tech for every camera. I believe the most vocal voices to sort out the false positives will be the police themselves. Deploying the stormtroopers for false positives, a few times per day, is not going to sit well with them.
shadowgovt 7y ago
Interestingly, quality of life doesn't seem to have plummeted in the era of a digitally-mediated panopticon as some sci-fi scenarios predicted.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Because it depends on human operators using intuition to look for suspicious activity. When the machine flags you as a terrorist you will be sent through the system as a CYA precaution. I knew a Mexican citizen who was a legal green card holder in the US. Unfortunately his name was a match to a fugitive on the most wanted list. Every US entry involved an hour long interview to confirm his identity. This is what machine vision will to to everyone with its false positives.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    > This is what machine vision will do to everyone with its false positives. That's definitely an impossible scenario, because it's not sustainable to interrogate every entrant into the country for an hour. So it's likelier that the ML algorithm will acquire bias to tone down the likelihood of false positive (at the tradeoff of occasional false negatives).
    - imtringued 7y ago
      You misread the comment. Not every entrant. Every entry by any person whoose name matches.
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        Ironically, match-by-name is what US customs has to fall back on because it lacks a facial-recognition system to make it easy to determine if the person in front of them looks nothing like the person of interest, and a well-implemented facial recognition system could decrease the odds your friend is subjected to an hour-long interrogation for having the "wrong name."
- 7y ago

mayniac 7y ago

I'm probably slightly younger than you, and I barely notice the CCTV cameras anymore. Weirdly, the one time I genuinely felt uncomfortable was last week. I saw a traffic camera* swivel across a junction. Actually seeing a camera move in such a way that it was clearly being operated by a human was genuinely unnerving. I took a wrong turn so it wouldn't see me, for no real reason. *One of these things: https://d1ix0byejyn2u7.cloudfront.net/drive/images/uploads/panel-images/Traffic_camera.jpg https://d1ix0byejyn2u7.cloudfront.net/drive/images/uploads/p...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dewote 7y ago
There is something about seeing any kind of surveillance camera move that unnerves me. At least here in Northern Ireland the traffic cameras can be viewed by the public with either a live video feed or regularly updating images.
pbalau 7y ago
> I barely notice the CCTV cameras anymore Maybe because, as most UK citizens (at least the ones I've spoke to about this), you know that most non traffic cameras are not under police control, but under the control of the establishment that installed them, bars, pubs, stadiums, office buildings etc and the police has to provide a good enough reason, via a warrant, to actually see the footage. There is also the matter of logistics, to connect every camera in say, London, to a central location to process the data, you would need a crapload of infra that doesn't exists at the moment. Not to mention how much processing power you would need to use this tech for every camera. I believe the most vocal voices to sort out the false positives will be the police themselves. Deploying the stormtroopers for false positives, a few times per day, is not going to sit well with them.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Interestingly, quality of life doesn't seem to have plummeted in the era of a digitally-mediated panopticon as some sci-fi scenarios predicted.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Because it depends on human operators using intuition to look for suspicious activity. When the machine flags you as a terrorist you will be sent through the system as a CYA precaution. I knew a Mexican citizen who was a legal green card holder in the US. Unfortunately his name was a match to a fugitive on the most wanted list. Every US entry involved an hour long interview to confirm his identity. This is what machine vision will to to everyone with its false positives.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  > This is what machine vision will do to everyone with its false positives. That's definitely an impossible scenario, because it's not sustainable to interrogate every entrant into the country for an hour. So it's likelier that the ML algorithm will acquire bias to tone down the likelihood of false positive (at the tradeoff of occasional false negatives).
  - imtringued 7y ago
    You misread the comment. Not every entrant. Every entry by any person whoose name matches.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      Ironically, match-by-name is what US customs has to fall back on because it lacks a facial-recognition system to make it easy to determine if the person in front of them looks nothing like the person of interest, and a well-implemented facial recognition system could decrease the odds your friend is subjected to an hour-long interrogation for having the "wrong name."
7y ago