5 ms·

This is a critical point, that CCTV and surveillance are two different, interrelated things. Imagine you appear on 50 different CCTV cameras on an average day.

This is a critical point, that CCTV and surveillance are two different, interrelated things. Imagine you appear on 50 different CCTV cameras on an average day. Now imagine two different scenarios: Scenario A: Each one of these cameras is operated by a local business or property management company. The cameras record video that gets overwritten within a few days if there are no incidents or requests from law enforcement. Scenario B: All of these cameras are on a network operated by a company with contracts for the city, law enforcement, and digital advertising networks. Facial recognition technology tracks you across all 50 locations, with an "anonymized" identifier attached to your biometrics. This identifier can be cross-referenced with other "anonymized" identifiers to build an advertising profile, while another contractor's machine learning system builds a threat profile based on movements of these identifiers, flagging outliers for human review. Both scenarios have the same number of cameras, but I don't think many would consider the two comparable.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwawaygh 6y ago
Worth thinking about how the scenarios converge when a few companies capture the commercial surveillance market and everything is streamed directly to a cloud storage account.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  And this. Which is EXACTLY what Ring figured out and so they took all those doorbell cameras, gave local law enforcement access, and now even on residential streets there are hundreds of cameras they have easy access too.
  - dmix 6y ago
    Ring is evil and all, but since we have a problem with them one of us genius hackers should make a product that has the functionality and critically the same UX but... doesn't use the 'cloud'. The sharing with LEO will always then be optionally and at your option, which still provides a similar net security benefit. Purely localized home storage and IOT stuff which offers similar features like remote access and whatnot, is clearly a really, really difficult problem to solve. Just like smartphone being essentially your entire one ISP coordinated popping from having your whole life in any security agencies hands. Maybe we need an organization like OpenAI to solve this problem. Like OpenHome or something. A place we can centralize our developer resources to providing a solution to this obvious proto-police state that is being developed out of pure utility, aka usefulness. Right now my friends moms washing machine and coffee maker are all wifi connected to be controlled and notified when done remotely from here phone. It's entering out lives fast and we need a solution and startups offering similarlly good products - or a private solution which can be sold to the manufacturers like Whirlpool.
    - godelski 6y ago
      Doesn't Ubiquity have this functionality? I think part of the problem though is setting up the servers, which can be a bit pricey. Not many people have NASs, despite them becoming much cheaper and easier to set up. It is hard to compete with the simplicity of cloud platforms. A full home operation still requires you to have the drives stored somewhere. I think the better solution is that someone offers a relatively cheap service that has a cloud option that fully encrypts the data and uses e2ee for communication to the server. Though it is hard to prove that you don't own the keys (I mean how many still distrust Signal?).
    - xkcd-sucks 6y ago
      A while ago I had this fantasy of a marketplace for video surveillance data where people could upload geotagged (+ time, etc) recordings and get a cut of the fee when someone pays to download it for insurance claims, etc. -- probably not any less evil but more egalitarian in any case
      - mrslave 6y ago
        This reminds me of the Library of Congress in Snow Crash. Lots of speculative surveillance and hacked intelligence gets uploaded to The Library where it sits waiting for someone to search for it whereby the uploader earns commission.
mattferderer 6y ago
I'm surprised Nest, Ring, Facebook or someone else hasn't started offering free security cameras & storage to select businesses yet to accomplish better advertising data for Scenario B.
- bigiain 6y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/police-offer-amazon-ring-free-exchange-access/592243/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/polic... "In most cases, when police want to search your neighborhood, they need a warrant and a reason to believe something’s amiss. Now “reasonable suspicion” is going the way of dial-up. Fifty police departments across the United States are partnering with Amazon to collect footage from people who use Ring, the company’s internet-connected doorbell. Some are offering discounted or free Ring doorbells in exchange for a pledge to register the devices with law enforcement and submit all requested footage."
  - caseysoftware 6y ago
    I had a situation recently where I needed to talk to some people to get their footage when a crime was committed against a neighbor nearby. Of the 8 I talked to around the neighborhood and explained the situation and said "between X and Y time", only 1 showed any hesitancy at all. I suspect most saw it as a way to help their neighbor and since I was specific, it was easy for them to check quickly and share the video if they found what I described.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      I think this is really the distinction that matters to me. If access to footage was available only to trustworthy parties; that is, people the person with the camera personally knows and trusts, then I'm more or less ok with this sort of thing. The person who owns the camera should own the footage and should have to -- on a case by case basis -- decide who gets access to it. But I'm really not comfortable with corporate entities mining their consumer devices for data to voluntarily give to the police. Incentivizing customers to give blanket permission to share all this data is unconscionable. It's especially telling that the normal path would require the police to get a judge to sign off on a warrant to get at this data. It's funny... in another post thread people are talking about a petition to have Microsoft withdraw their membership from the RIAA (in the wake of the youtube-dl takedown fiasco). Why aren't people banding together to demand that Amazon terminate their Ring camera relationship with police?
godelski 6y ago
I actually feel uncomfortable with both scenarios (though obviously substantially more with B). I think the question comes down to how much you trust your government/leaders (or future gov/leaders). I believe in the west distrust is correlated with the rise of authoritarianism. Which with those two correlating I'm actually more concerned because the potential for that power to be abused. I do not think the west is immune to dictators or autocrats, and far from immune to those in power abusing that power. To me surveillance hinders free speech, I mean isn't this the theme of 1984? (Many forget that it isn't that the government was always watching, but could.) It makes it more difficult to vocalize our feelings about abuse of power and makes it difficult to share messages conveying as much. We should feel free to communicate and criticize, and surveillance is one means to suppress that communication.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  B is not a hypothetical -- Link NYC monoliths have overlapping lines of sight for thousands of locations in New York, in addition to recording MAC addresses from every passing phone. And their records can be accessed without oversight.
netsharc 6y ago
Seems like China already uses tracking across their cameras, during the beginning of Covid in Feb/March there was a story of a guy who got told to quarantine because he was near an infected, but one day he went to a lake, and the next day police showed up at his place...
postsantum 6y ago
In Moscow, you can track people if you have a good photo of them and a couple of hundred dollars in crypto https://novayagazeta.ru/news/2020/09/17/164324-roskomsvoboda-cherez-sud-potrebovala-zapretit-sistemu-raspoznavaniya-lits-aktivistka-organizatsii-smogla-kupit-v-darktene-dannye-o-svoih-peredvizheniyah https://novayagazeta.ru/news/2020/09/17/164324-roskomsvoboda...
tsjq 6y ago
Do this level of advertisements really work? Ie, reflect into more sales?
- andruby 6y ago
  This level of information about individuals can be very valuable for political purposes. It can and probably has been used to influence elections and political power.
ohthehugemanate 6y ago
The latter scenario is shockingly easy to build with modern cloud services. I once built a toy example that would track a given face through all the public camera streams in my city (Berlin) in a two day hackathon (and we all know how little coding gets done at those). And just like that, stalking is obsolete. It's one of the only times in my life I've elected NOT to open source my work. As trivial as it was to build, I don't want to contribute anything at all to that creepy mess. That was three years ago. My key takeaway: just assume scenario B is happening already.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwawaygh 6y ago

Worth thinking about how the scenarios converge when a few companies capture the commercial surveillance market and everything is streamed directly to a cloud storage account.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
And this. Which is EXACTLY what Ring figured out and so they took all those doorbell cameras, gave local law enforcement access, and now even on residential streets there are hundreds of cameras they have easy access too.
- dmix 6y ago
  Ring is evil and all, but since we have a problem with them one of us genius hackers should make a product that has the functionality and critically the same UX but... doesn't use the 'cloud'. The sharing with LEO will always then be optionally and at your option, which still provides a similar net security benefit. Purely localized home storage and IOT stuff which offers similar features like remote access and whatnot, is clearly a really, really difficult problem to solve. Just like smartphone being essentially your entire one ISP coordinated popping from having your whole life in any security agencies hands. Maybe we need an organization like OpenAI to solve this problem. Like OpenHome or something. A place we can centralize our developer resources to providing a solution to this obvious proto-police state that is being developed out of pure utility, aka usefulness. Right now my friends moms washing machine and coffee maker are all wifi connected to be controlled and notified when done remotely from here phone. It's entering out lives fast and we need a solution and startups offering similarlly good products - or a private solution which can be sold to the manufacturers like Whirlpool.
  - godelski 6y ago
    Doesn't Ubiquity have this functionality? I think part of the problem though is setting up the servers, which can be a bit pricey. Not many people have NASs, despite them becoming much cheaper and easier to set up. It is hard to compete with the simplicity of cloud platforms. A full home operation still requires you to have the drives stored somewhere. I think the better solution is that someone offers a relatively cheap service that has a cloud option that fully encrypts the data and uses e2ee for communication to the server. Though it is hard to prove that you don't own the keys (I mean how many still distrust Signal?).
  - xkcd-sucks 6y ago
    A while ago I had this fantasy of a marketplace for video surveillance data where people could upload geotagged (+ time, etc) recordings and get a cut of the fee when someone pays to download it for insurance claims, etc. -- probably not any less evil but more egalitarian in any case
    - mrslave 6y ago
      This reminds me of the Library of Congress in Snow Crash. Lots of speculative surveillance and hacked intelligence gets uploaded to The Library where it sits waiting for someone to search for it whereby the uploader earns commission.

mattferderer 6y ago

I'm surprised Nest, Ring, Facebook or someone else hasn't started offering free security cameras & storage to select businesses yet to accomplish better advertising data for Scenario B.

bigiain 6y ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/police-offer-amazon-ring-free-exchange-access/592243/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/polic... "In most cases, when police want to search your neighborhood, they need a warrant and a reason to believe something’s amiss. Now “reasonable suspicion” is going the way of dial-up. Fifty police departments across the United States are partnering with Amazon to collect footage from people who use Ring, the company’s internet-connected doorbell. Some are offering discounted or free Ring doorbells in exchange for a pledge to register the devices with law enforcement and submit all requested footage."
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  I had a situation recently where I needed to talk to some people to get their footage when a crime was committed against a neighbor nearby. Of the 8 I talked to around the neighborhood and explained the situation and said "between X and Y time", only 1 showed any hesitancy at all. I suspect most saw it as a way to help their neighbor and since I was specific, it was easy for them to check quickly and share the video if they found what I described.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I think this is really the distinction that matters to me. If access to footage was available only to trustworthy parties; that is, people the person with the camera personally knows and trusts, then I'm more or less ok with this sort of thing. The person who owns the camera should own the footage and should have to -- on a case by case basis -- decide who gets access to it. But I'm really not comfortable with corporate entities mining their consumer devices for data to voluntarily give to the police. Incentivizing customers to give blanket permission to share all this data is unconscionable. It's especially telling that the normal path would require the police to get a judge to sign off on a warrant to get at this data. It's funny... in another post thread people are talking about a petition to have Microsoft withdraw their membership from the RIAA (in the wake of the youtube-dl takedown fiasco). Why aren't people banding together to demand that Amazon terminate their Ring camera relationship with police?

godelski 6y ago

I actually feel uncomfortable with both scenarios (though obviously substantially more with B). I think the question comes down to how much you trust your government/leaders (or future gov/leaders). I believe in the west distrust is correlated with the rise of authoritarianism. Which with those two correlating I'm actually more concerned because the potential for that power to be abused. I do not think the west is immune to dictators or autocrats, and far from immune to those in power abusing that power. To me surveillance hinders free speech, I mean isn't this the theme of 1984? (Many forget that it isn't that the government was always watching, but could.) It makes it more difficult to vocalize our feelings about abuse of power and makes it difficult to share messages conveying as much. We should feel free to communicate and criticize, and surveillance is one means to suppress that communication.

jacques_chester 6y ago
B is not a hypothetical -- Link NYC monoliths have overlapping lines of sight for thousands of locations in New York, in addition to recording MAC addresses from every passing phone. And their records can be accessed without oversight.

netsharc 6y ago

Seems like China already uses tracking across their cameras, during the beginning of Covid in Feb/March there was a story of a guy who got told to quarantine because he was near an infected, but one day he went to a lake, and the next day police showed up at his place...

postsantum 6y ago

In Moscow, you can track people if you have a good photo of them and a couple of hundred dollars in crypto https://novayagazeta.ru/news/2020/09/17/164324-roskomsvoboda-cherez-sud-potrebovala-zapretit-sistemu-raspoznavaniya-lits-aktivistka-organizatsii-smogla-kupit-v-darktene-dannye-o-svoih-peredvizheniyah https://novayagazeta.ru/news/2020/09/17/164324-roskomsvoboda...

tsjq 6y ago

Do this level of advertisements really work? Ie, reflect into more sales?

andruby 6y ago
This level of information about individuals can be very valuable for political purposes. It can and probably has been used to influence elections and political power.

ohthehugemanate 6y ago

The latter scenario is shockingly easy to build with modern cloud services. I once built a toy example that would track a given face through all the public camera streams in my city (Berlin) in a two day hackathon (and we all know how little coding gets done at those). And just like that, stalking is obsolete. It's one of the only times in my life I've elected NOT to open source my work. As trivial as it was to build, I don't want to contribute anything at all to that creepy mess. That was three years ago. My key takeaway: just assume scenario B is happening already.