All the surveillance cameras in the UK should just be wired into the cable TV network and let everyone watch everyone else.
Tim just posted a post about another post over at O’Reilly Radar about the artist Hasan Elahi whose work centers around tracking and photographing his everyday movements. Elahi becomes interesting because he’s one of the very few people who do this, Tim Hibbard being another. Jennifer Ringley of JenniCam easily fell into the category of constant surveillance too, without the location element. Because she was one of the first and few to do it so completely, she attracted a lot of attention for it. When more start people do it, it becomes less but not totally dis-interesting, celebrities fall into this category. When everyone does it, it just becomes noise, which is where tagging starts to kick in.
This got me thinking back to when I was talking at Technology 2.0 about maps but not what I was doing at flickr I was asked if there were privacy concerns about all this mapping stuff. I rather unfairly gave the answer of just “yes”, mainly because any serious answer would have taken far longer than the 30 seconds left before Yoz got his laptop working with the projector. Here’s a stab at the answer I would have given
The UK is one of the most surveyed countries in the world…
The exact number of CCTV cameras in the UK is not known but a 2002 working paper by Michael McCahill and Clive Norris of UrbanEye [1], based on a small sample in Putney High Street, “guesstimated” the number of surveillance cameras in private premises in London as around 400,000 and the total number of cameras in the UK as around 4,000,000. The UK has one camera for every 15 people.
– ref
…the problem with this is that we have lots of people being watch by a small number of people. We don’t know who those people are, how they got selected or even how holding such a position effects each person over the long-term.
Here’s step one, pipe all the feeds from the cameras into the cable TV network. Now anyone can use any camera at any time to watch whatever that camera happens to be point it. The surveillance is in the hands of everyone, not just a few people we didn’t pick ourselves.
“But” you say, “I don’t want the general public being able to watch what I’m doing”. I say “Chances are, what you’re doing isn’t interesting enough to warrant people watching. When everyone is watch-able, it becomes noise”.
“But” you say, “what about all the stalkers and other media created boogie men? Won’t they be watching people?”
The answer to both of these is in step two. Not only are all the cameras public, but who’s watching what camera and when is also public. This makes everything pretty fair now. You may be worried about people watching you, but now you know who that are, and watch them back in return if you so feel like it.
In the second stalker case, you end up with this situation. Say I’m about to walk through a dark area of town where I’ve never been before. Using some super phone application I can first see how many people are watching me at the moment and if it’s only a handful send out a request to be watched to the public or specific friends. The “stalker” knows I was only being watched by one person, them, but so did I. After the request to be watched is sent out, then both the “stalker” and I know I’m being watched by a couple of hundred people. If I continue to be watched by only one person, then maybe I change my plans accordingly.
For this to work there has to be an assumption that there are far more good people in the world than “bad” people. I happen to believe that assumption is true.
Now I know there are obvious flaws in this plan, but I’m just talking about an ideal situation. It’s very unlikely that step one would come to pass and even more unlikely that step two would happen.
This doesn’t stop each person from following Elahi’s lead though, the first few would be interesting the next 100 celebrities after that you’re just members if the public again.
There’s one last benefit to wiring in all cameras to nations TV I’d like to mention and it comes in the form of MythTV, P2P software and hackers.
If people can record the last 24 hours of footage from several cameras over a distributed network i.e. PVR systems in everyones’ house then we can store footage that would probably be too expensive (and bandwidth heavy) to do centrally. That data is sharable via P2P for redundancy and analysis. The analysis comes in the form of hackers who want to study traffic flow, as a random example.
I have great faith that a group of hackers with a resource of such data could easily produce much better traffic control models then any government agency. Which is just the tip of projects benefiting the public that would come out when the data is made public domain, rather than locked up for just a few unknown people to work with.
Note to self: go read David Brin’s The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
Filed under: conferences, talks, urban mapping
