I already see this constant video recording in place almost everywhere and we are probably not far from having this occur where everything that everyone does is recorded.
The supermarkets have it in their aisles and parking lots all over the place.
It is at virtually all offices that I have been in.
There are at various intersections and street corners.
The gym that I go to has it.
Hospitals, Hotels, restaurants, airports, and fuel stations all have it.
There seems to be no escape from this constant video recording everywhere.
I am not arguing that there are benefits to this constant video recording but every day, there seems to be more and more of this video recording being done.
I guess my question is:
Who is watching these recordings and then ultimately who ends up monitoring the people who are watching the recordings?
I can only speak from where I did work. The video was recorded on a hard drive but only the IT person had access to the video on the hard drive so this could only be used to look at events after they occurred and only if the correct time and place was known
Yeah, I’ve always wondered who in the world could ever wade through the gazillions of terabytes of data (or footage if you prefer) and catch someone doing something like, say, peeing on the side of a building, and then have them arrested for that. There’s just too much data coming down the pike for anyone to watch it all.
At a former workplace where they had cameras everywhere, the boss said to us in a meeting that basically no one wanted to have to look at all that footage so they’d really only do it if they knew already that something had happened and when. And that was in a workplace with about fifteen employees, so I can’t imagine how anything less than a small army of people could ever handle reviewing every single second of every single camera.
But, still and all, the idea of being surveilled every moment of my life really rankles.
You have no privacy on the Internet. You have no privacy in public.
You haven’t mentioned the half of it. People are recording their front porches, useful when someone steals a package. The San Jose police asked for people to voluntarily register their cameras so that the police can ask for video if a crime is committed within range. Cops on the streets and freeways use license plate readers looking for stolen cars, but before the information gets erased they’d have record of the location of lots of cars. Toll bridges record licenses also if you use toll tags. So do
pay express lanes.
As for who looks at them - no one, mostly, unless there is reason to. But when we get cheap facial recognition software no one will have to. If we wanted full employment we could just hire people to scan the videos - I bet there aren’t enough unemployed in the country to get them all.
When I watch British detective shows the cops are always getting the on-street monitoring video. I don’t know if that is accurate but the US is definitely moving in that direction.
I knew that I was missing some additional locations where this is being recorded.
Yes, I do find it unnerving at times as well so much that at times, that I don’t go out as much as I used to just because of the potential that I could inadvertently cause troubles.
I wrote a column about this, inspired by a column on license plate readers. We’re used to privacy because it was too difficult for anyone to track everyone. Orwell had his two-way TVs, but I don’t remember him talking about who looked at all that video. 20 years ago cops and toll-takers could theoretically note license plates, but they wouldn’t have been able to note very many. Automation is what killed privacy.
50 years ago the sf writer Mack Reynolds always had this characters who were avoiding government use cash so their movements couldn’t be tracked. That’s one successful prediction.
I ended my column speculating that perhaps our kids, who are more public on the web than I would ever be, are smarter than we are since they know there is no privacy and they don’t even pretend that there is.
I’m not sure Orwell grasped what a technical and man-hour challenge this would be, but I gather most of the population wasn’t under home surveillance unless somebody somewhere decided there was a need to do so. Winston himself is already under surveillance, we would eventually learn, because O’Brien had already pegged him as a thought-criminal.
We have cameras in our store, no one sits there and wades through all the footage each day. However, we have used them several times to track down shoplifters and hand the video over to the police.
I think that’s probably the case in most places, no one monitors it, but when there’s an issue then you can go back and review it.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized
In a way, it is already like that in society if you want to stretch what is already taking place.
True in that there are not camera’s in every home watching and recording every movement including audio but with these camera’s all over the place, it is not that far from reality
It’s got some obvious benefits, but on the whole I think it’s a negative.
It will not be long before the omnipresence of cameras nearly eliminates petty crime and establishes fault in many interactions. And no one has to watch the videos all day. You simply have to store it until a complaint is made. That seems like an obvious social benefit.
And not long after that, it will nearly eliminate privacy of movement. Already, if you carry a smartphone, various corporations and states can track your location pretty well. But you can put the phone in a Faraday cage if you want and move about with relative secrecy. Pretty soon, face recognition will make that much much more difficult.
Manpower will not be a barrier. It will all be automated.
I think that the major downside is that the elimination of private space calcifies and stratifies society. Imagine that we had this level of technology when homosexuality was generally classified as a mental disorder, or when interracial marriage was illegal. People who struggle against an oppressive social order, either by attempting to live their lives in peace (in the closet, passing) or by organizing against it will have a much harder time of it if they have no real privacy or anonymity. Even if everyone isn’t watched all the time, the social backlash for transgressions will have a major chilling effect.
So we end up stuck with whatever social mores the majority (or, possibly, the loudest minority) hold at the time the technological change arrives. You can already start to see this in Internet rage mobs. Go against the collective wisdom (and get unlucky), and a total shitstorm destroys your life.
I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Every bank has cameras all over the place, but they get robbed. Gas stations get knocked over left and right and they have cameras. One of the people that stole some stuff from my store practically looked right into the lens as he was stuffing things down his jacket. Petty criminals just aren’t that smart. Hell, the last person we caught, we caught because she stole one thing, but paid for others…with a credit card. I handed the police the camera footage and the credit card receipt with her name on it and they went right over to her house. A shoplifter that buys stuff with a credit card probably isn’t on the lookout for cameras.
Cameras are great for catching people and they probably defer some petty crime but they certainly don’t eliminate it.
I wonder what effect it would have on organized crime, though. It might catch more of that going down, but what effect would there be on the willingness of witnesses to testify? Because I think it’s a maxim that wherever there’s a database, there’s someone who can hack it. And knowing that the bad guys could do that might make the witnesses refuse to put themselves at risk or go into witness protection, knowing they could be so easily tracked and hunted down. It’s already stressful enough for people in W.P., and that would make it even harder for them to ever feel even halfway confident they’d be OK.
This is highly unlikely as petty crimes cost money to deter and punish. Further, there are already many places with omnipresent cameras that are subject to petty crime in spite of their presence.
But as you noted, people voluntarily provide that info to corporations for convenience. Privacy has only ever been as good as someone else’s desire to afford it to you, and the greatest protection to personal privacy has been the collective indifference of society. The latter issue protects people more now because people have better more varied things to do to occupy their time.
I disagree and I think recent history backs my side. It has broadly had the opposite effect. The very recent successful campaigns for gays and transgender rights highlights this given both are occuring in the age of mass survailenance. Both only gained major traction when people began to SEE the obstacles people faced, and recognize that both groups aren’t some other that deserves to be oppressed. The civil rights struggle for Blacks also benefitted when people saw things like segregated lunch counters and people being sprayed with hoses. This is one reason people say sunlight is a good disinfectant. Not to mention that it’s not as if people didn’t know who was probably gay back in the day.
You get stuck with people actually do rather than what they profess. Luckily that means more acceptance generally because people actually like being gay, having premarital sex, dating outside their race, standing up for the little guy, and a thousand other things that were frowned upon in years past.
Cameras are not yet omnipresent enough to prevent crime. As long as you can reasonably escape the eye of the cameras, then you can plan to get away with your crime. Who’s going to rob a bank when you’re not just on camera in the bank, you’re on camera outside the bank, getting into the car, on every street you drive on, getting out of the car, going into a building, coming out of the building… And the cost to find and monitor people will continue to drop.
The cost to punish isn’t written in stone, either. It used to cost a lot more to punish people who ran red lights. You had to pay a person to sit in a car near an intersection and watch for a violation. Now there are automated systems that will take a photograph, generate a citation, and mail it. It used to cost a lot more to track a suspect, too. Teams working around the clock. Now you throw a GPS on their car and run a database query with the phone company. The costs of enforcing norms are not going to help us here, because they’re dropping just as quickly as the cost to
I hope you’re right, but I think you’re wrong. I agree that broader societal acceptance of homosexuality has come about because people realize that gay people are “just like them”, you can’t get to that point at all without the closet existing. People have to have the freedom to live their lives undetected until they are strong enough to bear the disapproval. If people are ostracized the moment they step out of line because everybody knows what they did, how do we ever get to that point?
All those things you mentioned (civil rights advances, the sexual revolution and the early gay rights movement) started during the greatest expansion of personal liberty and effective anonymity. The automobile and the post-war economic boom gave young people the ability to get out from the oversight of their parents and cultural leaders. Do you think we have a free love movement if everyone’s parents can look at a web page and see who their kids are sleeping with?
The best model for omnipresent surveillance is not the past few decades. It’s small towns and villages before the age of the automobile, but more so. Small enough that everyone knows exactly what you’re doing and who you’re associating with. But even more so. Since in the past you could at least sneak off into the woods for a clandestine meeting. And historically, such towns had very rigid enforcement of social norms
People rob banks all the time, and they only get caught a bare majority of the time. Cameras have helped catch and prevent those crimes, but they are pretty much as omnipresent as they can be, and yet people still rob banks.
True, but the cost of punishing criminals continues to rise. It’s not just a matter of being able to solve a crime. It’s the cost of locating the suspect, convicting him in court, and possibly jailing him. That costs a lot of money, and it’s one major reason even a system would could solve every crime 100% of the time will not be widely utilized or sought out as a means of prosecuting petty crimes.
But you didn’t HAVE to pay someone to watch a red light. We did because we cared about safety/revenue. I am not saying technology doesn’t save money, but rather that there is a cost to enforcement that will almost always make punishing petty crimes problematic in many circumstances. Either way, the above is a positive example of surveillance.
You are forgetting that the costs of petty crime in terms of losses are dropping too. Goods and services get cheaper as well. An employee who stole an HDTV ten years ago may have cost an employer thousands in real losses whereas now it may only cost a few hundred. That means that the cost-benefit often stays about the same. In fact, it probably skews towards businesses as they have more incentives to be efficient and use technology.
But the “closet” can and will exist because people want it to. And even if that weren’t true, the closet has delayed acceptance of gays because it meant people were not exposed to them.
Indifference will almost always ensure that people have that right. The means to do something doesn’t mean people will do it. Again, it’s not as if people didn’t know there were bathhouses and dudes meeting up in rest stop bathrooms. You can and will always be able to have as much relative privacy a you wish because there is almost no incentive for ubiquitous surveillance.
Yes, but you are overlooking the fact that it was technology and an abandonment of privacy in some aspects that made these people aware that there was something else out there.
Yes, assuming diseases weren’t a factor. People are more promiscuous today than they were 25 years ago.
Again, I think you are ignoring that mass surveillance is almost always coupled with mass awareness and normalization of behaviors unlike what happens in a small town. A small town is often homogeneous enough to make mob rule and stifling gossip the norm. An entire country is not. This is why the internet has broadened acceptance by and large despite forcing us to surrender much of our privacy.
I have no doubt video recording is bringing to light Police misconduct and thereby creating public outrage which is the only thing that could possibly bring change to an entrenched, powerful and almost self regulatory organization.
The BBC series “Black Mirror” has an episode, “The Entire History Of You,” in which almost everyone has a chip implanted in their necks that perfectly records the video and audio of everything they see and hear every moment they are awake. It’s largely presented as a voluntary thing - you can delete stuff if you want. A person can at any time “replay” any point in their past, either privately on their own eyeballs or projected onto a screen a la Chromecast.
The implications are limited to just the effect on one marriage, and frankly they are absolutely terrifying. And they really didn’t take it all that far.