I guess the point of the post in particular is the London outlier but honestly I've always found comparisons of CCTV with 'surveillance' in a meaningful sense of the term pretty cartoonish. Obviously living in London is not like living in some police state.
The same goes for China even. Public camera surveillance I think mostly does what it's supposed to do with very little intrusion into people's daily lives, in contrast to old school police stops and frisks. Travelling I've had more bad run ins with corrupt cops in Bulgaria than I had in Beijing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?).
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.
"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."
This is similar but not the same from what I understand.
You still would be paying Ring for storage here. There is also the platform effects that once you own one, you'll buy more.
While the ethics of the Ring, neighborhood & police relationship are debatable, my thought was much less ethical & more related to reselling data for advertising purposes to cover the costs of the whole system. Such an idea seems more geared towards large city foot traffic areas with lots of eye catching items to provide data with. Shopping centers, sports stadiums, etc., would be ideal.
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.
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?
You are right, I was reading more into it and interpret it as please install our iot tracking to slurp up your data.
Our smart parking solution is a complete solution to track and monitor parking spot occupancy using smart video cameras and computer vision analytics to enable optimization. A dashboard gives you a clear view of parking in your community while parking policy tools help you track trends and modify policies to fit your community.
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...
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.
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.
I lived there for 7 years and I don't share the same feelings. Sure it's not like you live in 1984 but it feels much more like a "police state" in comparison to the rest European capitals.
>On Feb. 9, The Daily Mail in the U.K. published a story detailing the harrowing detainment of 38-year-old Kate Scottow. Scottow, a resident of Hertfordshire, England, was handcuffed in front of her autistic ten-year-old daughter and breastfeeding 20-month-old son, brought into custody and held for seven hours in a single jail cell.
>What heinous action warranted such drastic measures? The crime of “misgendering,” or calling a transgender individual by their biologically determined set of pronouns instead of their preferred pronouns, precipitated Scottow’s arrest. Stephanie Hayden, a biological male who recently transitioned to identifying as female on social media, reported Scottow to the police.
If you would have tried to tell people 10 years ago that this actually happened, people would have thought you were crazy, or accuse you of promoting the slippery slope fallacy.
The article makes it sound like she just accidentally used the wrong word, but in actually, she was repeatedly harassing the person and breaking what appears to be some sort of restraining order to do so. Whether an arrest is warranted is another question, but as always, it's a little less ridiculous with context.
So a guy posted "grossly offensive" or "of an indecent, obscene or menacing character", and infuriated everyone around him to the point that he had to be arrested "for his own safety,"
A woman was arrested due to her “willfully and maliciously engages in a knowing pattern of conduct or series of acts over a period of time directed at a specific person".
An opinion piece that just shows someone's opinion.
You should pick your examples more carefully because all you did was try to pass off people actively engaged in systematic abuse and harassment and persecution of vulnerable people as victims.
Anecdotal, but in my experience living in London, CCTV does fuck all. I've been robbed / stolen from multiple times in London, all caught on CCTV, never once helpful in apprehending any criminals or getting my possessions back to me.
And clearly not a great deterrent, as I've been the victim of more crimes in London than anywhere else.
I’m sorry to hear about your experience, but have you considered that this was a reasonable outcome of a cost-benefit analysis?
It’s a time-consuming and costly process to collect, review and pursue CCTV evidence.
If you’re the victim of a relatively minor property crime (e.g. having your phone or laptop stolen) it’s probably not worth the police pursuing it.
If, on the other hand, you are the victim of serious violent crime (murder, attempted murder, rape, assault, etc.), the police most certainly do trawl the area for cameras, request footage, review and identify suspects, issue appeals, etc.
> Obviously living in London is not like living in some police state.
In recent years, the police in London had a policy to harass anyone who was seen using a camera in a large, but completely unpublished, geofenced region of the city. That's not US/China/Saudi-level police state bad--as in, the UK police aren't able to arbitrarily confiscate cash or shoot people with impunity for having the wrong skin color--but it's bad enough that I consider such behavior a feature of a police state.
Any jurisdiction where it's not possible to perform the normal functions of everyday life, including creating works of art through photography, without fear of hostile police interaction is to some degree or other a police state.
I've had a couple of run-on this front. I spent a couple of years photographing industrial landscapes in London. Unless you are trespassing then you can tell them to hop it. Being arrested wrongfully is quite profitable for the receiver of the arrest and they are usually intimidated by reminding them of that in return.
> and they are usually intimidated by reminding them of that
Would I be wrong to assume you say that from a position of middle class white privilege? (A position I also hold, but from which I have significant empathy with those who do not.)
I'm guessing intimidating police by reminding them of the laws they're supposed to uphold works a lot less well for young black kids.
>I'm guessing intimidating police by reminding them of the laws they're supposed to uphold works a lot less well for young black kids.
Undoubtedly, but there is a power in knowing what and how to say something. I've been arrested and had to sit with three other unrelated individuals for a while, as we waited to be processed. We were all white but I really felt the treatment I received was significantly better than my two fellow arrestees and that was entirely down to not sounding...well, like an idiot. Even asking to read the Police "Codes of Practice" - which is offered automatically - was met with unease (and slight embarrassment) because it's apparently rare for people to say yes to that and they didn't have it to hand immediately.
You can call this a class benefit but I certainly wasn't dressed in a middle class manner (which is possibly why I was stopped initially) and my accent is fairly typical for South East London.
Yeah, I'm a motorcycle sports bike rider, so the police are my <David Attenborough voice>natural enemy...
It's kinda well known amongst my riding peers that some people "fail the attitude test" and end up way worse off than people who're at least polite and businesslike when pulled over. I've rarely "talked my way out of a ticket", but I've watched people talk themselves into 3 or 4 serious tickets where they could have "settled" for just the one relatively minor they deserved.
(I _did_ managed to escape without a ticket in San Francisco once, doing 100mph past a cop car on the Bay Bridge on a borrowed noisy piped Honda VTR1000 with a girl on the back wearing a blindingly white pure muppet fur jacket and a big fluffy glow-in-the-dark tule tutu. The cop car didn't trigger my normally well honed "cop radar" because in my head it was just a "movie cop car", not a real Australian Ford/Holden mortal enemy carrying sedan with our local highway patrol markings, so I just kinda obliviously cruised past him in fairly light 2am traffic into town. He light up his disco lights so I pulled over at the nearest exit, pulled my helmet off to reveal a grey-beard most likely older than his dad, and said in my broadest and fairly exaggerated Aussie accent "G'Day mate!" and told him "I was only doing about 100!" to which he said "Miles, you're not driving in kilometres now", and let me go with a warning to "ride safe, OK?" Pretty sure that was part middle aged white privilege combined with "way too much paperwork booking an Australian", with a little but of "Australians? We _love_ you guys!" cultural luck thrown in for good measure... But I'll take that rare win against them :-) )
I totally get that some people won't agree with me here...
To me, the rules are "advisory" and attempt to accomplish the actual social contract goal of "keeping other road users safe". The intended goal is safety - the rules codify more or less effective practices to achieve that goal. The rules are inevitably fairly blunt instruments setting limitations based on generalisations or lowest common denominator assumptions. A semi trailer doing 50 has a much greater risk of endangering other road users than a motorcycle doing 100. The bike has shorter stopping distances, better manoeuvrability, can evade other vehicles through much smaller gaps - and most importantly a motorcycle rider has a significantly higher motivation to "not get it wrong" due to the enormously higher risk of self injury in any accident. Car/truck driver mostly need to deal with insurance companies. I need to deal with being turned into road jam.
Assuming I was being "reckless" or "putting other lives in danger" because I was doing 100 in fairly light 2am Bay Bridge traffic (which was all doing 80 or so anyway) screams of mindlessly adhering to rules without any concern for the goals of the rules and the desired outcomes.
I'm most likely overestimating my own skill and safety, because everybody does - even people who understand that everybody does, but I've got about a million km of motorcycle riding over 30 years during which I've injured _zero_ other people to back up my side of this argument.
I also totally accept the fact that my disregard to being a stickler to the rules means one day I may "get the book thrown at me". I'd also point out that the cop in the incident recounted above should (and would) have done so if he considered me to be "riding recklessly and putting other lives in danger", and he chose not to. Apart from the Treasure Island entrances/exits, the Bay Bridge has no intersections or driveways where unexpected vehicles might enter, has great sightlines to see slow or stationary traffic from long long distances, and often has traffic flowing at 70 or 80. There are definitely times/places on that bridge where doing 100 is clearly not "reckless" - although I totally understand some people's subjective opinion of reckless is no doubt different to mine, and the minisucle increase in risk to there road users of a motorcycle moving through light traffic at 20mph faster than everyone else on that stretch of road could for some people cross over into recklessness.
(I also admit I have a somewhat risk-happy personality, and view a lot of things differently to my more risk averse friends. I would be astounded to discover my personality trait there was not shared by a majority of HN readers. You don't dream of starting or working for "swing for the fences" disruptive startups if you're a rules stickler. Maybe my "enjoy riding fast on the road while accounting for others safety" has crossed over into the Uber-style-evil rules flaunting. I don't think so, but I bet Kalanick doesn't think that either, and he's wrong - so maybe I am too...)
Yeah - I'll totally give you that one. The hobby certainly attracts a higher than average level of fuckwits. (And I may well be kidding myself presuming I'm not one of them.)
I like to think you'd rarely even notice me on the road though, I'm rarely flamboyant or behaving unexpectedly in traffic (even though pre-covid I commuted every day by bike), and my rule-breaking (these days at least, I will admit for being stupider when younger) is mostly reserved for non main highway out of town backroads, or late night/early morning mostly empty roads.
The police in the UK are exceptionally unlikely to shoot you, whatever your colour, leaving you free to pursue your wrongful arrest case with a side-order of claiming it was racially motivated via either (mostly) free legal aid or a number of specialist no-win-no-fee lawyers.
I don't think it works well for any race in North America. Unless you are the mayor or some powerful police union boss I see a local beatdown occuring and/or finding a reason for a charge.
I think the problem is that the infrastructure is being being built up. Even if they aren’t using the cameras right now for surveillance, the infrastructure is ready to be used be a bad actor in the future. I think that’s the real risk of building this up.
Not saying that surveillance is right, but I've lived in London for a year and a half and never felt this way, I don't think I've ever talked to someone who felt this way there, you must be a very paranoid individual.
I will say this though: having lived in both Beijing and London, I've always felt ultra safe (and I lived in London during some terrorist attacks). On the other hand, I lived in SF for the same time and I never felt safe there, avoiding walks at night, avoiding public transport for the most part, avoiding some streets, etc. I also lived in Chicago and I felt much worse there (at least in SF I could still take walks).
On the other hand, although I find driving in SF much more stressful and confusing than London(despite being a native RHT driver), I never managed to get a ticket in SF. Every time I visit London I keep getting letters with some bullshit traffic violation captured by a camera for months after I am back.
Also having lived in London for 7 years, I can't say I felt safe walking at night other than in the very central places. Try visiting Elephant and Castle or Seven Sisters alone during the night.
> although I find driving in SF much more stressful and confusing than London(despite being a native RHT driver), I never managed to get a ticket in SF.
Why is baby’s response flagged and dead ?!?!?? He literally just gave his perspective as a person living in that city. The people that flagged them should be banned from this site.
I assume they took offence with the "you must be very paranoid" just because someone feels odd about surveillance. It certainly seems pretty rude to me.
I think non-CCTV plastered European cities is probably a more apt comparison than Chicago and San Francisco, two cities that have a reputation for being unsafe in the US (which has major problems with violent crime across the board).
Not to discount your feelings completely, but I’m always a little skeptical when someone says a place “feels” safe or unsafe. Do you have reason to believe you actually were less safe in San Francisco compared to London?
My first two weeks in SF I took the bus twice, the first time a group of kids started slapping random people, I was prepared to fight and protect my SO but they didn't get to me; the second time some guy just ran and took a girl's phone, she grabbed to it for what seemed like a full minute, screaming and shit, then finally let go... I was paralyzed, especially after the event of the previous week, after that I vouched not to ever take the bus again in SF.
After that some homeless people screamed at me, some tried to punch me slowly (easy to avoid), I got used to it with time but it's still not a nice feeling to take walks. I wouldn't let my SO walk alone at 3AM through the streets for example (while I would have no problems with that in London or Beijing).
> This is not obvious to me. London subjectively feels like an oppressively surveilled and policed city to me any time I spend time there, and avoid it for that reason.
Spend some time in a real autocracy, then see if you feel the same way.
> I've always found comparisons of CCTV with 'surveillance' in a meaningful sense of the term pretty cartoonish
I think your experience is related to class. When I read your comment I think - ok they must be a Petty Bourgeoisie or Bourgeoisie.
CCTV is used to catch and punish so called 'criminals'. But when many public spaces and parks in London have been sold off/privatized[1], and the Commons has been plundered everywhere (IP, knowledge, etc.)[2], the laws punishing 'theft' are pretty laughable to me. In my research lately, I've been coming to the conclusion that maybe the ones who are making the laws are the real criminals.
There are systemic thefts taking place: the slow privatization of public lands, the pay-to-play dynamics of modern day law, and the plunder of the educational and knowledge Commons through Intellectual Monopoly - making human curiousity illegal.
The last time this appeared on HN [1], this chart was (rightfully) called out for being unsourced, garbage data.
This chart continues to be unsourced, garbage data. Look at the source for it - it is this spreadsheet. [2][3]
The primary source for all of China's figures in that spreadsheet is this [3][4] puff piece.
Now, the astute reader will notice something strange with this data. Somehow, the primary source [3][4] for the spreadsheet claims that camera/capita in China is similar to the rest of the world - yet, for some reason, the spreadsheet - and the subsequent article claims that all the major Chinese cities have an order of magnitude more cameras than the rest of the world.
Garbage in, garbage out. The methodology for gathering the per-city statistics was wildly inconsistent (There is incredibly obvious undercounting[3] happening for nearly every datapoint that's not in China), and the end product is completely worthless - unless you are, of course, using it to reinforce pre-existing biases.
[3] You can tell this spreadsheet is utter garbage, by looking at the entry for NYC in it. It claims that NYC has 31,490 cameras in it. I've visited NYC twice, and I've probably walked past more cameras than that in the ten days I was there.
I live in China as a foreigner, I didn't lock my apartment for 3 years. In the first year I didn't even have a key since my flatmate lost it. I can literally walk in my neighbor's flat if I accidentally exit on the wrong floor. All their doors are wide open 24/7. Sometimes, small kids playing in the corridor open my door (the only reason I might lock the door hehe). Delivery guys leave all the boxes outside the front door. People leave their macbooks and bags unattended in coffee shops.
Surveillance surely plays a role in all this, the question is how much. How much is surveillance vs. the upbringing of an individual.
This is somewhat common throughout east Asia. Setting a phone or purse down to reserve a table is something I've in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and even Vietnam. There's less of an idea that criminals will be deterred from crime because of surveillance, but that nobody is crazy enough to want to steal a phone or just walk into someone's house. A lot of people here just can't imagine the thought process behind committing crimes like that.
No locking at home is common on some rural area in Japan, but I believe almost all people locks home on non-rural area. Stealing from house is a common thing in news.
yep. I live in a very small city (<80k) that is being abused as a test case for hyper-surveillance, including geofencing and cctv tuned to phone activity.
They look to be located somewhere around Darwin Australia judging from their blog posts.
Seems like an okay city to line with cameras judging by the wiki page : "Darwin has had a history of alcohol abuse and violent crime, with 6,000 assaults in 2009, of which 350 resulted in broken jaws and noses—more than anywhere else in the world, according to the Royal Darwin Hospital."
I question the accuracy. When I was in Korla, Xinjiang, there were exponentially more cameras than I noticed in the rest of China.
Cameras that wouldn't let a gate up unless they got your picture going into public places like malls or airports, cameras every few miles or so on highways, A few cameras for each road at an intersection, to name the interesting ones.
"Comparitech researchers collated a number of data resources and reports, including government reports, police websites, and news articles, to get some idea of the number of CCTV cameras in use in 150 major cities across the globe. We focused primarily on public CCTV—cameras used by government entities such as law enforcement."
They seem like VERY vey rough estimates. China probaly has the most surveilled city in the world. But effectiveness of camera's is a much more important factor. I've heard of many places in china where you are forced trough gates with photocamera's or active surveillance. China is more than likely to have the most fake camera's in the world as well.
> Where possible, we have only included public CCTV cameras, including cameras installed on public buildings, cameras used by law enforcement, cameras installed on public transport, and traffic cameras with surveillance capabilities (i.e. automatic number plate recognition). However, in some instances, it may not be clear what cameras are included, meaning some private camera figures may also be included in the totals. We believe this may be the case for London and Sydney.
I don't think even Orwell thought people would actually pay private enterprises to install listening devices (Amazon Echo etc.) and cloud connected surveillance video (Ring etc.) devices in their homes.
I've had an IDF soldier tell me that the old city of Jerusalem is the most surveilled place in the world, but I guess that wouldn't show up on this list because it's only a relatively tiny section of a much larger city (and who knows if they did their research on that or were just boasting).
And it's not very good data - as I mentioned in another post. The methodology for gathering it is second-hand, and wildly different across the different surveyed cities.
I live in a very well known city of approximately 34,000 residents and nearly 1400 CCTV cameras. I wonder how many cities fly under the radar in this regard.
I work at a place that has tons of CCTV cameras monitoring the bird droppings and the comings and goings of people throughout the day. When crime occurs, we review the CCTV footage. We often capture footage of people behaving badly and even breaking the law. We curse under our breaths at the terrible acts these people have committed. Next we try to identify the people. This is the hard part. Normally, we have no way of identifying the people captured on film. Perhaps if our company permitted us, we could upload this footage to say, Youtube and let the hive algorithm attack and identify. Until then, our film will end up on a hard drive until forgotten about and deleted. When the cameras are all doing facial recognition we should worry. Until then, I think, there is a certain degree of anonomity when captured by CCTV surveillance cameras.
Is anyone truly surprised? The future looks bleak with China set to become the global leader (it is just a matter of time at this point, especially thanks to COVID).
I only hope for India to also become a major powerhouse to curb China, and for Korea and Japan to regain their footing.
Even if the government weren't incentivized to surveil everywhere, it's a no brainer for people to install cameras around their businesses/homes/cars for liability purposes since they are so cheap now.
A couple hundred dollars can reduce a lot of headache, and I don't see that incentive going away anytime. I assume every car will have a dash cam, a house will have a doorbell cam or similar, and every business is monitored everywhere. And cities/states will have license plate readers on police cars/roads.
>The future looks bleak with China set to become the global leader
We get what we deserve. At least two generations have stood by and allowed the West and its influence on the world stage to be degraded and eroded without so much as batting an eyelid.
When one steps back and looks at what they've facilitated, one starts to see some reality in the "strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create strong men" cycle often touted.
They will have missed Monaco, as they only looked at the 150 most populated cities. When I was there around the millennium it was the clear leader in police officers per head of population, so I expect it’s also doing well on cameras.
The reason they missed it, is because their data is complete rubbish.
This is the source for their chart. [1] It claims that NYC has a mere 31,490 cameras. As anyone who's ever been in NYC will tell you, that is complete and utter nonsense.
For most places, the number of tourists won't affect much the equation. Only in a few famous microstates, for example, Monaco and the Vatican that this skew could happen.
That reminds me that I read once that Vatican's crime per capita looks very horrendous if it is based on crime/resident, but most crimes occurred are petty like pickpockets targetting tourists.
I've been wondering if the combination of remote work and self-driving cars will counteract the increasing surveillance of urban centers. Does suburbanization/sprawl make surveillance too expensive to be practical?
I never thought about that. If the police could quickly connect to any parked/moving car and see what its cameras saw that would be like eyes just about everywhere.
BRB: Going to look for that line item in Tesla's public financials... (Come on, it's not like Musk wouldn't have talked this over with Thiel, right???)
It's worse. Every frame captured is stored somewhere. Five years from now they can track your movements by picking out the sequence from cars that drove past you.
You'd wish, but I think there will definitely be home office surveillance in the employee contract if the economic situation of recent years continues.
Suburbanization also makes satellite surveillance easier and "acustic" face to face interaction much more difficult.
I'm surprised that Urumqi (the capital of China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) doesn't show up on this list, given
how serious the CCP takes security there [1]. Maybe the study's authors simply didn't have access to data for that region.
2019 murders in London (population ~9 million): 149
2019 murders in Houston (population ~7 million): 140
2019 murders in Chicago (population ~2.5 million): 490
It seems difficult to assess the impact of surveillance cameras on crime. There are many factors that would impact it. It may be more instructive to look at the 'solved crime' rate. Does the % of convictions positively correlate with the number of cameras?
I, and many people I know, have been the victims of property crimes and other crimes several times over in Seattle. The understaffed police force (meaning per-capita officer counts well below median) are unable to investigate these crimes and so perpetrators are never identified and arrested. This is because violent crimes take priority and so there simply isn't enough staffing to devote time to other crimes.
Surveillance and facial recognition could help our police force effectively put this limited staff to use, so that criminals face consequences and crime is deterred. I have no problem using technology to enforce existing law effectively, just as I have no problem with cops using cell phones or vehicles to do their job. I do find the dystopian extent of how these technologies are used in China (e.g. social scores) to be unacceptable, but we can institute the right regulations around these technologies to prevent broader abuse while still retaining the benefits (a cheaper and more effective police force).
Before the pandemic, you were probably caught on camera committing several crimes. Nothing serious. Some jaywalking, maybe, or perhaps you stood on private property without knowing it, or you were smoking a few centimetres too close to an entrance ... there are dozens of possibilities. Hundreds.
Now: you are T-boned by a car running a red light. The driver is the son of a police captain. You want to press charges, but suddenly, you are being indicted for dozens of crimes. It took all of minutes for the police to pull out every single time you were in public for the past 7 years and, thanks to the wonders of AI, not much longer to narrow down to the forty or fifty occasions during which they have you on record as committing a crime.
Are you still sure you want to press charges against the captain's son? Or should bygones be bygones? Because it will be hard to press charges and fight dozens of charges in court, one at a time. In fact you will be in and out of court for years to come. Or not. Who knows?
If we have the ability to detect a crime at low cost, we should detect the crime and apply the law uniformly, and dispassionately. It should be applied as often as possible. Either the law exists and is enforced, or the law should be repealed. In your hypothetical scenario, if I have crimes I've "already committed", then those should have already been brought up.
But that's sort of my point as well. I think we can come up with the regulations to avoid the situation you describe. It may involve what I suggested above, updates to statutes of limitation, etc.
It won't be applied uniformly and dispassionately. That's the point. The laws we have on the books far outweigh capacity to enforce them, so enforcement is selective. Lowering the cost will make enforcement more selective, not less.
Camera's dont 'surveil' anything untill a crime has been committed. Only then do people search for active camera's and hope it was pointing the right way in daylight or good enough infra. China esp will boast camera's everywhere as its a dictatorship but with thousands of camera's that may or may not work its like finding a needle in a haystack. Every country has a different reason for camera's and china especially has a different purpose in mind. Its not like their courts or policeforces are working on the basis of innocent until proven guilty. Being surveilled isn't the goal here, its instilling fear of possibly being surveilled (Which is highly likely). Once you've fooled the population into thinking everything they do will seen by the highest authority, that's when you're closer to the holy grail of true power.
Isn't this argument essentially how the NSA justified mass surveillance before Congress, weasel-wording their way around the definition of "collection"?
The same goes for China even. Public camera surveillance I think mostly does what it's supposed to do with very little intrusion into people's daily lives, in contrast to old school police stops and frisks. Travelling I've had more bad run ins with corrupt cops in Bulgaria than I had in Beijing.