Okay - so cameras are proliferating, and when Google Glass goes mainstream, they will be even more portable. There are emerging protests and some Camera Etiquette being discussed, but let’s face - things are changing.
So - which happens more and which is a bigger issue?
Conformance - we all have to “straighten up” because we’re all being filmed. As the saying goes “if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.” All of our Big Brother fears moved one step (or more) forward…
Lapsed Social Conventions - look, if everyone is getting filmed all the time, folks are going to have to get used to seeing people do things that would never have been filmed before. We already have sex tapes all over the place and videos featuring popping zits and other personal, gross stuff have become commonplace. Will it just be a free-for-all and we have to consciously choose to avoid the gross stuff?
Or does my premise not hold - we aren’t facing “all cameras, all the time” anytime soon?
I think that your premise holds and that it will eventually get worse than we can imagine right now. By that I mean that there may come a time when we are on camera for a huge percentage of our time, certainly all of our public time.
People have already begun to absorb the fact that if they are in the presence of a group of strangers, even a small group, then they are in the presence of a functional video camera that is smaller than a wallet and is connected to the internet. Some have absorbed this to the point of moderating behavior, and things like Romney’s 47% speech may even bring it home to the less technologically aware among us.
As for lapsed social conventions, I think Jerry Springer and Cops put that to bed a long time ago.
Well the simple fact is that you really shouldn’t be doing anything that would be cause for trouble, camera or no. Whether a camera happens to be around or not should be moot to a moral human being.
That said there are places where morally cameras are not supposed to be - the areas where privacy should be reasonably expected: homes, bathrooms, closed office doors, etc…
The thing is the laws already support that very concept of private spaces being immune to legal camera coverage. There are very serious penalties for having a hidden camera in a place where it should not be.
I am, by nature and business, quiteprocamera. It acts as a witness to events which can prove useful later in the pursuit of justice.
Perhaps, and this is only conjecture, in the pre-camera days, the thought that people were watched and ultimately judged by a supreme being was the equivalent to having cameras watching us. Anyone who doesn’t believe in such a thing might feel free to behave as they wished.
Now the quite real (but in fact limited) concept of public surveillance has arisen and that cloak of anonymity is being cast aside. It’s not surprising that people who also engage in questionable behavior on the internet might take issue with their cloaks being removed (this comment not aimed at anyone in particular - a generalized statement which will likely give me grief).
As a victim of crime in both the real world and bothered by folks on the internet, I am perfectly happy with removing anonymity in the public commons, where people should expect to be identified. In places where privacy should be expected then that privacy should be absolute.
There is a line that can be drawn between the two.
In terms of “we should all be moral so cameras should be fine” - sounds interesting in concept, but the Human Condition™ seems to suggest that moral lapses happen frustratingly often, even to the best of people.
Online anonymity is, to me, a separate topic: for different types of interactions and transactions, how transparent should one be required to be? Seems an important discussion to have in an era of identity theft, etc.
I am not sure how that relates to being on camera for an increasing percentage of one’s existence.
One potentially major problem is that not everyone agrees on what’s “moral”, and some people are likely to take private vengeance for “immoral” behavior. Say, someone tracks his employees with all these cameras, and finds an excuse to fire any that are homosexual or express political/religious opinions he disapproves of or “dresses slutty” on their own time. One worry I’ve heard expressed about all these cameras is that we’ll end up with something like a medieval village mentality, where everyone watches everyone at all times and absolute conformity is enforced by all the busybodies who make a point of watching everyone for “sin”.
And then there’s the possibility of someone using the cameras for things like identifying “sinners” like homosexuals and murdering them.
I concur with your assessment, so perhaps the word I should have use was law-abiding. However moral is what I used and that was to further the analogy of people behaving because they should.
Now in my perfect world we’d have people from everywhere doing that which they choose to do without interference from others, and cameras would be used as enforcement to prevent someone from harming another person for any reason.
However I tend to be fantastically optimistic so when I write these things it’s in the hope that people will do the right thing in the end. Sadly I am aware that isn’t usually the case, but I’ll work towards the right ends and hope it gains ground.
Right now I have video of 4 crimes that have been caught either by my home security system on on my dashcam in the last 45 days. The police are active in 2 of the cases, one is being dealt with civilly, and the dashcam case is unique because that involved following a suspected DUI (it’s really obvious on tape) for 42 minutes and never getting police to help me (jurisdictional issues). We’re in an open debate as how we should proceed with that one.
So ultimately my answer is perhaps ‘moral’ might have been a word that sounded wrong, I hope these systems can be used to advance legal protection of victims, such as the very people you mentioned as fearing they would be abused by the system.
…I’m oddly reminded of Asimov’s short story “The Dead Past.” Spoilers and a link to the wiki below.
The Dead Past tells the story of the invention of a device that can look into and observe the past: but the creators of the device never realized that the “past” has literally already happened and what they had created was the ultimate voyeuristic machine. And thats kind of where we are heading. I think we will adapt: we have so far. It wasn’t too long ago that a mobile phone was a strange idea, let alone a phone with a camera. We are in for interesting times ahead…
In a way, this is a step forward, not backward. In the past, all that was needed was one person to make the declaration, “Jack and Joe are homosexuals!” The claim could be a lie: it didn’t matter much.
Now the photographic evidence is at least a bit more meaningful, more objective. It’s harder for someone to make a false accusation.
The CTA has installed cameras all over the system. Every platform has a dozen or more cameras, and every train car and bus has nearly as many. But the thing is, few of them are monitored live. They exist almost entirely as a forensic tool to review what happened, because the human labor to actively monitor the cameras is much more expensive than the cameras themselves. From what I’ve seen, virtually the only cameras that are actively monitored are the ones in casinos, and that’s because the potential loses make it worth doing.
Actually monitoring cameras to try to prevent crime is an unsolved AI problem.
Yes that’s the real situation. I have a bunch of cameras at my house recording 24x7 and regenerating on a 10 day schedule. I do NOT come home from work every night and surf the recording to see what happened. I DO go searching when something odd happens like my friend says “Someone broke into my truck” or something of mine has obviously gone missing.
Then it’s a quick search, gather the evidence, call the police and watch nothing get done.
It’s truly not as big a problem as people might believe…
I’ve installed security camera systems for clients, and even when the system has successfully footage of criminal activity, it’s hard to get the police to do anything. But when they want to see what you have for their own reasons, they are a lot more interested.
I had a recent situation where a delivery truck turning into the businesses parking lot hit a car. The cop had decided the truck driver was in the wrong. While the cop was finishing up, I looked at and extracted the video, which proved that the car driver was wrong. And the cop stuck to his theory. Hopefully the lawyers for the trucking compay and the judge are slightly more open to reality.
I have 3 cameras in my work truck for this very reason. Since December I have been in 3 ‘incidents’ where I have had to exchange insurance information with another driver. In each case I was not at fault, in each case the other driver told their insurance company it was my fault, and in each case I was able to provide video showing otherwise.
Our Travellers rep likes me. A lot.
I also find it forces me to be more aware of my own driving habits, knowing I might catch myself being bad someday. That isn’t a bad thing…