Legislature Building? Around Courthouses? Banks? Public Transit? Schools? Traffic? On the Streets? Should they exist in all of these places, only some of them, or none at all? What’s your opinion?
(Btw: I remember my highschool had them, felt kinda creepy since I distrust the school admin, like… even the other places with cameras didn’t feel as weird)
Depends what you do with the information. I dont care if a hotel wants to surveil me moving around their building. But I do care when large networks of security cameras track my movement throughout a city.
I dont expect full privacy walking into different shops and through trainstations but I expect those to just be there to review footage if something goes bad. No face scanning no sketchy shit.
honestly theres an argument for putting a camera anywhere, dont want kids to smoke in the halls before class? install a camera. do you want insurance and justice after a home invasion or burglary? install a security system, honestly the only places where its unacceptable to install a camera is in any type of restroom, or personal spaces like a bedroom, there also shouldn’t be cameras in places like private offices or places where people will be less productive at the thought of being watched.
also no excessive camera use by the government in public spaces, but private property in that public space makes sense, like a coffe shop, or a mall.
My problems with surveillance is not being surveiled but how that information is used. Surveillance is just a tool and, like weapons, are neither inherently good nor bad.
I’m a privacy advocate, but I do not believe that the cameras themselves are the main threat to privacy, and do not necessarily have a problem with cameras placed in any of the locations you listed, given the following conditions:
The camera system is closed circuit with the footage stored securely on a device on the premises, not connected to or stored on the internet, not combined and analyzed automatically/algorithmically with other footage and data, and the footage is deleted or overwritten after a reasonable period of time.
I believe the main threats to privacy involve how the footage is stored and analyzed.
Seconded. A lot of harms we see from surveillance cameras (and all kinds of other tech) come from how and to whom the data is made accessible to, rather than the cameras themselves.
It’s fine if my neighbor has a doorbell with a camera on it so they can see when a package is delivered, when their kid comes home, or have video of something happening on the sidewalk that could possibly be needed as evidence in a court case, where they can manually export a video and give it to whoever would require it. But it’s not fine if that video is being always uploaded to a corporation’s servers, and they’re handing it off to the police, for example.
Surprisingly, Ring actually stopped doing this given enough backlash, but the risk still remains of future changes to that policy, any breach or software vulnerability, etc.
Ring has said they’re going to start doing it again. They stopped until people cared about something else and now that people are distracted they’re gonna start doing it again.
Put them everywhere.
On privat property. Trainstations and airports. Museums and other collections.
When i was in the UK i was shocked how there are cameras everywhere
I’m a big proponent of police body cams.
acab and it should be legally required that their enforcement of the law has a neutral witness (the camera)
An issue with this is that they are documenting people in their worst moments (violence, fights, rape, abuse, drugs, accidents, etc.). What happens to that footage? Are all cops allowed to freely access it / share it between them? What if the footage gets hacked/leaks, and people all over the world can leer/laugh at people in their most vulnerable moments, or find them in real life and harass them?
Additionally, could police use out-of-context footage to sway public opinion on people (for example, only getting to a scene where a person was being hounded and attacked by people and then defended themselves, and so in the footage you only see that person being violent) (edit:) or in a protest where people become violent/confrontational only after police instigation
Additionally, could police use out-of-context footage to sway public opinion on people
I mean that’s not really an argument against the cameras themselves, but against the act of selectively editing it.
That’s like saying photos shouldn’t be allowed as evidence because photoshop exists.
Maybe a neutral commission (sort of like a jury) should be the ones that handle the the data.
CCTV is fine in my opinion, what isn’t fine is flock cameras being used on a national level tracking hundreds of millions of people.
Obligatory deflock mention! (If you see a camera in your city that’s not on the map, add it!)
And it sure would be a shame if such cameras got vandalized somehow. Spray painted over, shot at, knocked off the proper viewing angle… So many terrible fates that could befall a camera near you!
snipe it with a paintball gun from afar
imo I should be for real time observation and referencing a specific thing.
I’ve worked in places that had to have cameras everywhere but also had strict prohibition on viewing the archived data, because it was in a hospital setting. and people’s privacy was a legal issue
i don’t think it should be used to monitor people without cause basically
On private property: up to owner as long as they don’t record what is going on outside the property. Notify about recording with signs.
Public spaces: only if there is a good reason to.
Good reason is quite the strechable definition tbf
Only cameras for very sensitive areas should be actually monitored.
For anything else, the rule should be recording only and then deleting after 48 or 72 hours unless something important happened.
Cameras I’m ok with, facial recognition and all that other bullshit I’m not ok with though. Camera feeds are good for piecing together accidents and stuff like that but companies shouldn’t be able to track down all of your personal information just because you walked into their shop with facial recognition scanners at the door.
anything involving government bodies. on the police, at the postal service, in the senators office. they should not eat sleep or shit without the tax payers knowing how long and what color.
but nowhere else that isn’t regulated by law or funded by taxes. yes if government is doing inspections there. No if Jimmy Grocery Store manager wants to be able to review footage of a workplace injury.
I want full government transparency but no surveillance industry
Looking at other comments, clearly I’m in the minority that I simply feel watched when there’s a camera that I know is aimed at me right now. I can’t know if someone’s watching, or watching it back later. I’m not doing anything nefarious, not more than picking my nose perhaps, but it’s not like everyone’s given a feed of all cameras that exist either. Clearly people don’t want to just be watched insofar as it is avoidable
Most of the time I don’t know that a camera is filming me and ignorance is bliss. And obviously facial recognition and license plate scanning, as mentioned in other comments, goes even further. But I’m also simply not super happy with the ubiquity of cameras on every street and every publicly accessible place and vehicle you use, even if I see their benefits as well
I’m ok if they are used to extend surveillance and actively prevent a problem. For example in a shop to block shoplifters or in a swimming pool to spot someone drowning.
I find them a lazy and often useless solution in most of the other cases. It’s nice to have the video of a robbery or a car accident to investigate later, but I don’t want the robbery or the accident to happen in the first place. Imagine the case of an homicide: it’s cool to catch the killer, but the victim remains dead. Cameras are a cheap “solution” to have the illusion of control.
Plus: the whole face recognition thing is going to be a huge problem in the future in the less-democratic countries.
