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I'm MUCH more comfortable with street photography than CCTV. I don't care if my image is taken in public, I have no expectation of privacy in the moment. But

I'm MUCH more comfortable with street photography than CCTV. I don't care if my image is taken in public, I have no expectation of privacy in the moment. But I do care about subsequent analysis of, and storage of linked metadata about those images. A random street photographer or member of the public is unlikely to be connected to a permanent, secret, and searchable database of facial recognition, gait analysis, or whatever else linked to bluetooth/phone signals to identify people in the images. I cannot say that about the many, many CCTV cameras that seem to be everywhere. Some people may think that's paranoid, but that's exactly what they would have said about mass surveillance pre-Snowden, and when you look at how much data they were storing and analyzing back then, think about what they're probably doing now... Such scary things are possible now that couldn't have been imagined even 20 years ago.

kolinko 5y ago
Well, once someone publishes your street photo, it becomes instantly available to a plethora of searchable databases from all kinds of jurisdictions. If it's CCTV, it's just one company that manages the photos, under local regulations.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  But that would be just a single image with no context, and usually no location and no ability to link it to bluetooth or phone number, as most online services remove exif data now, I belive. It's not like a fixed CCTV camera that is continuously recording and being constantly analyzed and stored forever, and can detect regular patterns of behavior, and thereby able to automatically tag things that are "out of the ordinary". >If it's CCTV, it's just one company that manages the photos, under local regulations. How could you possibly know that? There is nothing to say that the information is not being shared. TBH, it's extremely naive to think that information stays inside the building, or that the three-letter agencies haven't already connected those thousands of cameras. It's interesting that you use the word "photos" too, what I'm worried about is much more than photos, it's a permanent historical record of dates/times/movement patterns that can be linked over thousands of cameras, creating a continuous historical record of everyone's movements, all linked to those photos. They can track a single person's movements over years. It can also correlate with other people to detect who may be connected to who. Bigdata tracking everyone at all times. Give me a random person snapping street photos any day. Any way you cut it, fixed cameras are more worrisome.

kolinko 5y ago

Well, once someone publishes your street photo, it becomes instantly available to a plethora of searchable databases from all kinds of jurisdictions. If it's CCTV, it's just one company that manages the photos, under local regulations.

brokenmachine 5y ago
But that would be just a single image with no context, and usually no location and no ability to link it to bluetooth or phone number, as most online services remove exif data now, I belive. It's not like a fixed CCTV camera that is continuously recording and being constantly analyzed and stored forever, and can detect regular patterns of behavior, and thereby able to automatically tag things that are "out of the ordinary". >If it's CCTV, it's just one company that manages the photos, under local regulations. How could you possibly know that? There is nothing to say that the information is not being shared. TBH, it's extremely naive to think that information stays inside the building, or that the three-letter agencies haven't already connected those thousands of cameras. It's interesting that you use the word "photos" too, what I'm worried about is much more than photos, it's a permanent historical record of dates/times/movement patterns that can be linked over thousands of cameras, creating a continuous historical record of everyone's movements, all linked to those photos. They can track a single person's movements over years. It can also correlate with other people to detect who may be connected to who. Bigdata tracking everyone at all times. Give me a random person snapping street photos any day. Any way you cut it, fixed cameras are more worrisome.