This is another relevant (but different) video:
I assume we here as privacy advocates have a general concern cameras are turning the physical world into a surveillance nightmare. For several other reasons outlined in these videos, these âsecurityâ cameras should never have been put up in the first place.
Am I the only one who sees extreme irony in this privacy community forum asking about installing âsecurityâ cameras again and again?
Cameras are a tool much like computers. Just because computers can be used to capture information on society en masse, does that mean we should advocate for unplugging entirely in the name of privacy?
So as a parent, I need CCTV cameras for my kids rooms so that if I hear a noise in their room, I donât have to go into their room and risk waking them up or monitor them to make sure they arenât climbing or doing dangerous things.
Another valid use case is pets.
Also seeing if my plants need watering.
Also to see if I remembered to turn the stove top off.
And yeah, another one is security. I donât know why you put security in quotes when there are plenty of ways cameras both deter crime and provide ways for you to interact with someone while keeping a bolted door between you and a potential offender.
I do get the annoyance about public cameras on every corner. Evidence shows that these donât actually lower violent crimes and simply take unconsenting videos that arm law enforcement to imcarcerate people. The narrow benefits that are touted are far outweighed by the detriments, especially how that has played out in countries with authoritarian tendencies.
But what we should really be clear about other than residential vs public CCTV is, where do those videos go and who has access to them?
The CCTV systems being discussed in PG are generally if not always about local only systems that set the precedent that if you try silly shit I have evidence to give to authorities. The ones mentioned in the article send videos to big tech companies that are intentionally selling those videos off to help authorities create surveillance drag nets. For the local only residential cameras, I get the footage relevant to some crime and nothing more. Not people or cars randomly walking by to make a surveillance drag net, just the bits that I want to share with authorities in the event of a break in or conflict.
Its a private house so foot traffic is likely people I know and care about and for random people, their faces will be removed after my recordings cycle from low disk space. I also wouldnât have incentive to sell this data because nobody would buy it by itself. The whole value of these drag nets is the size of the net once you buy camera footage from Google and Amazon. My small footprint is an atom of water in the bucket needed for it to be useful.
Even ignoring privacy implications I think these cameras are just accelerating the erosion of trust in one another. That new Neighbours TV show really highlights how the combination of having the ability to record and broadcast all our minute disputes is really doing a number on our collective psyche.
I would argue poverty/wealth inequality, mainstream news, social media, and systems of oppression has more to do with the breakdown of trust in society than CCTV as a technology.
That very same technology and cameras on cell phones that you say are responsible for tearing down the fabric of trust is now how we are able to keep large systems of oppression from bending the truth. Perfect example is the hard evidence we have of ICE raids in the US where videos and CCTV footage contradicted the accounts of the federal government as they shut down state level investigations.
In order to even begin talking about trust in society, the ruling class needs to either be acting near to a benevolent manner, and we need to be continuously addressing inequality. I am of the belief that this is impossible in large nation states and am a staunch decentralist.
Humans and really any animal is not good at applying empathy beyond hundreds to thousands of people, so being aware of that plus the industries like social media that apply behavioral psychology to tap hate buttons in our brains daily, itâs no wonder people would think to use CCTV as a means to prove the divisive narratives they believe abiut their neighbors are true. Thatâs a downstream effect if a much larger issue. Itâs not CCTV or wanting live feeds of whatâs going on at your house, itâs that people who are taught not to trust will use technology at their disposal to confirm narratives they are biased to believe.
Thanks for posting that. I hadnât heard of ring, but it sounds pretty bad. I do have a smart device with a camera, but itâs on a separate VLAN that has device isolation. That would prevent some of the problems heâs talking about. The camera is also used to monitor the device itself, with nothing else being visible, so I feel itâs justified in this case.
Overall the smart cameras sounds a lot worse than I realized and I already wasnât a fan of putting up cameras everywhere. I would go local network only or physical storage if I did need one, and, if logs can be seized, I would delete the logs periodically rather than hoarding them. I would use a fake camera if my main goal was to scare people.
I do have family members with microphones and cameras in every room. Iâm sure they would say they have nothing to hide and donât care if someone knows when they use the toilet or photos of them without clothing go to some server where people theyâll never meet can see it. That doesnât make me feel great about going there.
I mean weâre mostly in agreement here about the root causes, but letâs be honest ring cameras and social media have gone hand in hand with just pushing the collective insanity for suburbanites. I donât think these Ring Cameras caused this, but suburbia is already an alienating way to live and I genuinely this technology is just feeding into that mentality that your home is under siege from outsiders and must be protected at all times.
I think itâs possible to acknowledge that technology can have the liberating benefits of everything from exposing reactionary violence from the state while also furthering the neuroses that we get from living in a hyper atomised society. All of this technology has so much potential for good, but the incentives are in place to utilise all this technology in a way that makes everyone miserable.
As for your last part Iâd have to strongly disagree, people are perfectly capable of showing empathy to a mass of people who are outside of their own lives. Weâve seen it through the 20th century in the form of international class based solidarity movements and itâs starting to reemerge today as even Westerners become more conscious of imperialism.
I think were mostly on the same page with CCTV alienation topic. I just have a greater emphasis that the technology has no part in cuasing alienation as it is just tech being used in perverse ways by peoples in a system where the most wealthy profit off of or simply lower their visibility as the issue while most of us are alienated. Iâd similarly apply that to social media. Mastodon has no part in fueling alienation (quite the opposite) and yet itâs a distributed form of social media. Why? Because it isnât centrally owned and doesnât have algorithmic behavioral and emotion knobs to tweak.
I agree with this, and reduced thus argument too much to make it sound like I believe humans canât care for outgroups. Humans absolutely have the ability to apply compassion for outgroups but itâs not a default behavior or mode most live in every day unless weâre forced to. Thatâs the whole basis of ingroups and outgroups is that to expand your more kindred empathy to those you share identity with based on who you perceive you are and who fits within that group.
The fastest way to disolve alienation is a common cause. The ruling class prefers war so they can scapegoat the badness to another country, but dissolving the middle class like weâve seen with technologies like the printing press, industrial assembly lines, robotics, and AI is where solidarity and that mindset empathy pulls us together.
The issues I was also alluding to is also about how large governments apply homogenized policies that have no way of representing the beliefs of an increasing group of people. So then people voting based on their local values canât apply empathy to people hundreds of miles away and this has more to do with shortcomings of beurocratoc methods that apply over our day to day living that I donât think work at a larger level. This gets into a whole other can of worms about homogenized cultures that breeds resentment in whole other ways. Basically you need governments but local context matters soooo much. If we donât resolve this systemic way of making policies into zero sum power grabs we will constantly see alienation from back time and time again until we realize itâs the policy setters benefitting again.
@bitsondatadev I appreciate your response.
Like I see you also believe, what I find utterly disgraceful is neighborhoods, vehicles, houses, business stores etc littered with cameras. Similar to what @Gopher said this is not indicative of a civil society but more like a hostile society. This constant surveillance disproportionately undermines the personal safety of minority groups and other vulnerable/powerless people, additionally it undermines everyoneâs freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of association, medical freedom and other human rights. It psychologically harms everyone, reminding them theyâre being watched and they shall conform to the status quo. Such intrusive mass surveillance is antihuman and denies people dignity.
Mass surveillance has advanced such that I stopped spending time unnecessarily in surveilled spaces, even for the most normal things like haircuts, eating out and walks around my own neighborhood. My threat model is such that getting caught doing some normal activities that most other people normally do exposes me to risk much higher than the average person. I can only imagine how suffocating this surveillance would be for people who are actively targeted by corporate, state, criminal or terrorist actors, and how the surveillance enforces conformity and loyalty to the powerful.
I agree they are tools. But they are also weapons, thus must be used with care and pointed at the right target, at the right time. Same for knives, baseball bats, guns, vehicles, computers, data etc.
I donât suggest we should just dismantle all cameras. I agree most of the use cases you identified could necessitate a camera. But I believe many use cases Iâve seen go too far to technohope and convenience and too far away from peopleâs safety, rights and dignity.
I like your example of interacting with someone at the front door. If that camera never records footage and is not pointed towards public space, it would not cause harm. The same thing could also be accomplished by having a seethrough steel grating security door.
I put âsecurityâ in âsecurity camerasâ in quotes because in the majority of cases these cameras cause more insecurity than they provide security.
While the presence of âsecurityâ cameras can deter some would-be criminals, like you argued, crime statistics do not demonstrate âsecurityâ cameras reduce crime rates. Criminals may respond by covering their face or (if theyâre motivated) jamming the cameras, or may simply ignore the cameras and effect their crime.
Further, âsecurityâ cameras undermine the security of innocent people caught in the surveillance net, and the security of people who operate the cameras. Generally speaking people who buy âsecurityâ cameras for the promise of security are fools who may put themselves and people interacting with them in harmâs way. Some operators have âgood guy syndromeâ and donât imagine they themselves and innocent people could be harmed by the cameras they operate. All someone needs to do to have a target punished is turn over information that will cause them harm if leaked, or evidence that justifies a lawful search/seizure or civil/criminal prosecution against them. Operators face a range of liabilities wrt operating âsecurityâ cameras.
- Elevated risk of interaction with law enforcement, courts and insurance companies.
- Allowing insurance companies use footage against them when they make a claim.
- Being compelled to preserve or turn over video footage.
- Being suspected of suppression of evidence if said footage doesnât exist because it was deleted, recording was disabled, the camera failed or autorecord didnât trigger properly.
- Privacy violations via smart camerasâ telemetry data.
The OP video explains some of these points and some other points. Skip to 14:54 for operator liabilities and to 21:24 for efficacy of surveillance.
I acknowledge PG is trying to recommend less-harmful cameras. The situation would be better if all the âsecurityâ cameras littered everywhere were of these types. At the same time I worry camera recommendations tell people the privacy community thinks itâs fine to put people and their activities under surveillance. The irony of it persists.
From a harm reduction standpoint âsecurityâ cameras may be less harmful and more justifiable if these mitigations, and any others I havenât thought of, are taken as applicable.
- Assessment of risk and proportionality of putting something under surveillance before installing cameras.
- Preventing cameras from having any view of outside the boundaries of oneâs own property, for instance a shared road/path or neighborsâ properties.
- Clear signage warning of the presence of cameras before people enter any cameraâs view. (Often people can see these warnings only when they are already under surveillance.)
- Disabling and hiding cameras where and while nonmembers are permitted to be present, for instance inside a restaurantâs dining hall during opening hours.
- Manual camera activation by operators upon first sign of an incident instead of the norm that recording is always on or always triggerable.
- Secure access control to the footage (network security, encryption).
- Local storage and not participating in the surveillance dragnet.
- Limited storage duration enforced by automated secure deletion, except for footage selected for preservation.
But the technological mitigations above give no assurance to outsiders about cameras that are visibly present. Unless informed otherwise, they wonât know the footage is stored only onsite, will be deleted after 48 hours, will never be shared and will never be used maliciously. They will have no choice but to assume they are being surveilled and the footage will will be fed into big tech AI systems.
All the above has this caveat. There is always the possibility of malicious hidden cameras. We live in a world where cameras and information technologies have advanced to such extent itâs impossible to guarantee privacy anywhere, and unless an EMP wipes it all out (this will never happen) there is no going back.
Many people these days rush to cameras for security, but there exist many other measures. Dogs that will bark loudly, physical barriers, access control, safe rooms, vaults, alarm systems, stronger neighborhood communities and others.