It’s hard to discuss public surveillance without immediately being asked about privacy issues. As technologists working on computer-based surveillance, it’s tempting to say this is outside our area of expertise, but we believe there may be a moral imperative to state our views on this thorny issue.
Firstly, it would seem public perception of CCTV surveillance has changed over the years.
Some 20 years ago, if I’d mentioned Big Brother to a class they would all think of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the abuse of video surveillance by a totalitarian state. Now they’re more likely to associate it with covorting housemates in the hit reality TV show.
The very idea of being watched has become normalised, and is no longer associated with Orwell’s horrific, dystopian image of “a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”.
In the UK, despite notable complaints by civil libertarians, the general public appears to like CCTV. CCTV is perceived to provide safety in car parks and public spaces and people need to feel safe and secure.
Indeed, in the late 1990s, public CCTV was first installed to clean up crime and vandalism in troubled London suburbs such as Brixton. The result? Local councils in cooperation with police caught the criminals and vandals and removed signs of crime such as graffitti and broken windows.
With the signs of crime removed, the public began to visit the shops again and the streets gradually became safer.
This strategy worked so well that the cameras became redundant because no crime was being observed. But when the council tried to remove the cameras and deploy them elsewhere there was pubic outcry – people believed that CCTV meant safe streets.
No-one really expects privacy in a public street, but they do expect safety.
Less intrusive, more effective
It could be argued (very convincingly, we believe) that it’s unreasonable to expect privacy, in the sense of the right to remain anonymous, in public areas such as hotels, shopping malls or railway stations.
The London Tube bombings in 2005, or the 2008 Taj Mahal Palace bombings in Mumbai are just two of many reminders that terror attacks are no longer confined to airports.
And we shouldn’t forget that the use of CCTV for face recognition is a far less intrusive method of identifying members of the public than the traditional inspection of identity papers.
Giving the game away
The strange thing today is that many people are voluntarily throwing away their privacy by revealing intimate details on public websites and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
Once a face image is uploaded to the web it is almost impossible to erase it completely. This issue is now posing a risk to undercover police and people in witness protection programs, where there are legitimate reasons for switching identity.
While some aspects of privacy remain sacrosanct, it’s our belief that the ability and possibly even the right to remain anonymous in public spaces is diminishing over time.
The very concept of privacy must be redefined in an ever-more transparent world.
This is the second in our five-part series on advanced surveillance. To read the other four instalments, follow the links below:
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Comments (5)
Bruce Arnold
(Lecturer in Law at University of Canberra)
Irrespective of concerns regarding privacy, the enthusiasm for CCTV as a technological fix is worrying because the authors apparently disregard more than a decade of solid criminological literature (ie based on hard facts) about the failure of CCTV as a crime reduction mechanism. Put simply, most CCTV in public places doesn't work, with or without biometrics of various flavours. Let's look to the facts, not the NICTA promo
Jay Kay
(logged in via Twitter)
Despite how common the "You're on Twitter & Facebook, so you can't expect privacy." argument is, it remains, as it always has been, total rubbish.
It's exactly the same as saying "you share things with your friends, so you can't expect us to not take your property". This argument is suggesting that because I share SOME things, that now EVERYTHING is open-slather for the taking. The information I choose to put on Twitter or Facebook does not include other information I choose to keep private.
What…
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Troy Barry
Mechanical Engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)
The argument that because one dozen or so Australians annually submit themselves to television's Big Brother proves the remaining 22 million don't value their privacy, is equally poor.
mixmaxmin
(logged in via Twitter)
"It is our belief that we shouldn’t complain about our privacy – and indeed that the “privacy” argument is a red herring – in an ever-more transparent world" What a strange comment to make about privacy; even if conceding that it is a red herring why would anyone abdicate the right to complain to keep the bastards honest! This is a very poor approach and encourages negligent behaviors that become complicit with western governments' approaches to overkill on the invasion of privacy under various anti-terrorism laws. I expect safety and privacy, I also expect government to use technology to ensure their operations become more transparent, for example where do my tax dollars go to the cent? That would be easily possible to document, but governments hide behind all sorts of curtains to avoid that level of accountability; Hey you, yes you watch out as advanced surveillance is watching you too!
Paul Dalgarno
(Editor, The Conversation)
Thanks for posting, mixmaxmin, and drawing this to our attention. Thanks to "technical issues", this piece was published with a "holding" last line, written by the editors ahead of getting final sign-off from the authors. The intended version, in the authors' own words, is now on the page.
The original last line, as intended by the authors, is now in its place.