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At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoUS has more, per-capita? https://www.precisesecurity.com/articles/Top-10-Countries-by-Number-of-CCTV-Cameras https://www.precisesecurity.com/articles/Top-10-Countries-by... USA has 1 camera for every 6 or 7 people?
- keiferski 6y agoIs this actually a useful metric? Cities should be compared to cities. Also, that link doesn’t seem to say whether cameras are owned by the state. Presumably surveillance operated by the government is more totalitarian than various private businesses.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoFrom a personal point of view the valuable stat would be the likelihood I will be on camera, don't you think? Seems per-capita covers that?
- keiferski 6y agoI guess, but I still feel that including NYC and rural Wyoming under the same metric makes it useless. Something like ‘Sq. Feet under surveillance’ might be better.
- the8472 6y ago"lawful access" interfaces can mean automatic access by the government. It's outsourced mass surveillance.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoIn the movies and on TV, they always have to 'ask for the tapes'. Wonder how it really works now - the NSA already has it all?
- noarchy 6y agoIf those cameras have any kind of outside accessibility over a network, the NSA is probably just one of many with potential access.
- kwhitefoot 6y agoSee also: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/28/anpr_sheffield_council/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/28/anpr_sheffield_coun... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23005820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23005820
- strictnein 6y agoThe NSA doesn't have access to US security cams and couldn't care less about them. Come on people...
- whatshisface 6y agoRandom people find access to unsecured networked security cameras all the time, of course NSA could find them if they wanted.
- noarchy 6y ago>The NSA doesn't have access to US security cams and couldn't care less about them. The same NSA that has vacuumed up phone and internet data, including that of US citizens?
- pkaye 6y agoI'd like to see a breakdown by cameras by government, companies and homes. I think all those are not equal. Its one thing to have a camera looking at your porch for package thieves but a camera in government hands can be used for a lot more.
- fnord123 6y ago@mods, actual title is "Unchecked use of computer vision by police carries high risks of discrimination" which is the big issue here.
- deogeo 6y agoYes, mass surveillance is A-OK as long as it's not racist.
- fnord123 6y agoYou have no expectation of privacy in public or on state owned areas (roads, walkways, squares, parks).
- detaro 6y agoNot universally true. Different places have different laws about this.
- deogeo 6y agoNo expectation of privacy (arguable, but okay) doesn't imply it's OK to build mass surveillance infrastructure there.
- Silhouette 6y agoMaybe you should be entitled to some respect for your privacy in public, though. Indeed in some places you are today. There is no good reason to extrapolate from the natural situation that "If you go out then someone might see you" to the entirely unnatural "If you go out then you should be subject to arbitrary surveillance, recording and analysis by unknown parties who also have access to unknown additional data about you for unknown purposes."
- fnord123 6y agoSure. And the article is about exactly that.
- LatteLazy 6y agoBasically every city in the UK (not technically in the EU since Jan) have it, that's 72 right there. Is this meant to be a secret?
- fnord123 6y agoThe article is about using Machine Learning on the video feeds, not that there are video feeds. And the issue at hand is that ML algorithms can have racial bias in the classifications.
- ReactiveJelly 6y agoSeems like a red herring. They want you to assume that mass violations of privacy are okay as long as they're not racist. They're also ignoring classism - It's fine if the rights of the working class are violated, as long as they're all violated equally. Never-mind the people who can afford privacy on the free market.
- jon889 6y agoI think as long as your in public then it's fine to assume you're being recorded by CCTV. Obviously the government being able to access cameras in your own house like 1984 is not ok. But CCTV in public does reduce crime and help investigations. For example the Central line in London doesn't have CCTV (unlike most of the other lines) and it has the most assaults. https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/central-line-trains-have-no-cctv-on-board-and-the-highest-number-of-reported-sexual-offences-1-5592640 https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/central-line-trains-ha... I think wether you can trust your government to not misuse it (eg tracking minorities) is somewhat separate.
- the8472 6y ago> For example the Central line in London doesn't have CCTV (unlike most of the other lines) and it has the most assaults. So crime just shifted there. If you install CCTV there it shifts somewhere else. That doesn't mean you're decreasing crime. This is a report by the UK home office which finds that CCTV has little to none impact on overall crime rates: https://techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~iluetkeb/2006/surveillance/paper/social_effect/CCTV_report.pdf https://techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~iluetkeb/2006/surveillance...
- iampims 6y ago* Brussels * Kortrijk * Prostějov * Prague * Mannheim * Marbella * Nîmes (FR) * Nice (FR) * Cannes (FR) * Roubaix (FR) * Marseille (FR) * Toulouse (FR) * Yvelines (FR) * Warsaw
- yodsanklai 6y agoAny correlation with the local political color?
- williamdclt 6y agoAll the French ones are right-wing, 5/7 from Les Républicains (The Republicans, a right-wing conservative party). That doesn't say that much, as most of France is under right-wing leadership at the moment (president is centre-right)
- kaesar14 6y agoCurious, do the French people consider Macron a right winger?
- speedgoose 6y agoCenter right yes. The prime minister is a from a right party. On average since the election, Macron's popularity went down with French people voting left, and raised (or didn't went down as much) with French people voting right.
- kaesar14 6y agoWas the "voter-base" that put him in power primarily of the left or the right wings? Or more to the center in general?
- yodsanklai 6y agoThe right wing candidate (Fillon) was out of the race due to some financial scandal. The left wing candidate (Hamon) who won the primary wasn't supported by the "left establishement" (who rallied Macron) as he was too much on the left. Macron was also widely supported by the medias, and there was some enthusiasm to have a "fresh" candidate. He doesn't appeal to conservatives, neither to the left but considering the circumstances it was an easy win for him. I'd say its voter-base are the educated, urban professionals.
- Barrin92 6y ago> This is why, after decades of controversy, Google Translates still renders the gender-neutral “they are doctors” in German as “sie sind Ärtze” (masculine) and “they are nurses” as “sie sind Krankenschwestern” (feminine). Google Translate was not programmed to be sexist. The corpus of texts it received happened to contain more instances of male doctors and female nurses. [...] BriefCam’s spokesperson added that they used “training datasets consisting of multi-gender, multi-age and multi-race samples without minority bias,” but declined to provide any evidence or details. Okay, will we at some point admit that we want machine learning algorithms to be able to interface with symbolic rules rather than pretending that everything is a data issue as if we're living in the era of 1930s inductionism? It's clear that the misgendering issue here is not a stochastic one that ought to be solved by 'balancing out' data, it's that we want to impose strict linguistic rules and constraints on a system in a clear manner. There really needs to be more work done in AI that makes it possible to interface with the models we built rather than trying to reframe everything as a data problem and then shove it in some end-to-end black box and then hope that whatever comes out at the other end is correct. The automated systems used in the article are supposed to make judgements about "Detection of body movements that constitute assault." This requires genuine understanding and high-level capacity to reason rather than just pixel-based inference from some camera.
- Tomte 6y agoGoogle translates it that way because German nouns have grammatical gender, and doctors are grammatically male, while nurses are grammatically female. It has nothing to do with training ML models (except insofar as most training input is grammatically correct). Of course, some people are unhappy about it and experimenting with gender stars and gender gaps and other creative orthography, but this is the status quo. It's quite strange to demand that some ML model is more "progressive" than society and speakers themselves.
- Barrin92 6y agoThe issue here is that grammatical gender is not useful information when reasoning about the semantics of some sentence. Toothpaste in German is grammatically female, that's not a reason for an ML system to make feminine assumptions about toothpaste after it combs through data, it has nothing to do with progressive values, it's that the ML system cannot distinguish between a spurious correlation and actual meaning. Today many more medical graduates are women, this will change the ratio in the future and the inference from grammatical gender will be wrong. We should be able to tell an intelligent system from the get-go to ignore something we know to be spurious rather than fiddling around with the data. And it's not strange at all to demand of an automated system that it behaves exactly the way we want it to behave. It is not human, it has to be more precise because it is rolled out at scale and it needs to do what we tell it to do. When we use industrial machinery in manufacturing we don't go "ah well humans are only precise down to a centimetre, guess we'll let it slide". An automated car trained on speeding drivers must not learn to speed. Automated systems are faster than humans, so errors compound, which requires more precision on part of a machine. If a ML system accidentally learns that ignoring someone wearing a green shirt is okay, and that is rolled out to a million cars, you don't have an accident but a big disaster. We need a way to interface with ML systems in ways that let us put precise limits on when it makes inferences from data, why it made those inferences and when to follow logical rules, and when to dispose of certain data.
- Jon_Lowtek 6y agoMannheim is running a "pilot project" called "Mannheimer Weg". It is video surveillance + behavior analysis. The german state of Baden-Würtenberg, where Mannheim is located, has already announced to expand "intelligent video surveillance" to other large cities, starting with Heidelberg this year and focusing on central train and tram stations. There are many sources in german about this topic, some praising it, some are more critical. Another such "pilot project" is run at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof and that one got a lot more bad feedback, because they also "try" facial recognition and tracking smart phone signals. It should be noted that the european union invested into this technology starting with the 7th Framework Programm in 2007 under the codenames INDECT, ADABTS and SAMURAI. Expect to be flagged for "abnormal, possibly criminal behaviour" in the future if you run or loiter at a large train station.
- codethief 6y agoHere's what I don't understand: Apart from Heidelberg central station there is only one other place in Heidelberg – Bismarckplatz – that will be subject to intelligent video surveillance and that place already comes with a police station right in the middle of it. So how about increasing convential police presence instead? What's more, in my experience police in Heidelberg is outstandingly slow to respond. I once reported a mass brawl of ~100 people not far away from Bismarckplatz and police didn't care to arrive until 20min later (with two officers…).
- Jon_Lowtek 6y agoGermany: the city of Freiburg is also buying 18 new cameras for the area "Bermudadreieck" and "Bertoldstraße". I couldn't find any information on how "smart" that system is going to be. In Darmstadt the central tram hub "Luisenplatz" is going to get modern video surveillance, too. Bought from Dallmeier Electronic GmbH & Co. KG. The mayor said no facial regocnition is planned, even if the vendor offers integration with such systems. Its unknown if advanced behavior analysis is included. It is likely that all cities buy from different vendors and may get very different quality of automated video content analysis. In Hannover the local police veiled their own cameras last year during a demonstration against a new police law. The demonstration asked for that and announced to go to a court and the police just complied without waiting for a court order, as they wanted to show clearly that they are not interested in filming and (possibly) personally identifying their political opposition. When the city council in Darmstadt was asked for such a rule for the soon to be installed cameras, they laughed and said both the police and the interior intelligence agency can and will request demonstrations to be filmed on a case by case basis and the people will not be told if the cameras are on or off. Germany's federal police (BKA) and ministry of interior security ("Ministerium für Staatssicherheit") are unhappy with these fragmented and diversified solutions. They aim for a networked system that can find people nation wide on any camera using biometric recognition when a search warrant is issued. In the meantime Deutsche Bahn is experimenting with a "facial anti-recognition feature" that replaces faces with fakes because they believe they can easier share the data with third party data anaylsis providers if they do that.