I've known people get battered/robbed out of view of CCTV and be very disappointed that big brother wasn't watching and there was little prospect of the offender being identified/caught, I'm not sure that they'd have took much consolation from knowing the liberty they happened to be enjoying in those moments!
Well, of course. But you could equally say that if I got beaten up after midnight when walking home by a gang of 20-year-olds I'd lament that we don't have a universal curfew of 10pm for under-25s, or similar. We accept that life isn't perfectly safe in exchange for the liberty to go about our business unimpeded. Or at least we did until recently.
Mike seemed to have an issue with current CCTV. I'd agree though face recognition and audio CCTV are far more questionable. The majority of people are probably giving far more away freely through their phones to foreign corporations/governments without a care in the world though...
I don't want to derail the thread into a CCTV debate particularly, because that was a debate I was having 15 years ago and I've accepted I've lost that one and tried to move onto other things that maybe I can have some effect on. But in brief, my issues are:
- Lack of accountability. Who is watching the CCTV and what safeguards are there against abuse?
- Lack of effectiveness. CCTV is all too often used/proposed as an alternative to proper security/policing. A CCTV camera may help find the people who beat me up, but it doesn't stop me being beaten up in the first place.
- As part of the 'slippery slope' we're descending where all routes to conduct your affairs anonymously without being recorded, tracked and logged are being closed, and we're supposed to accept this as 'normal'.
Now CCTV *in current form* is fairly hard to data mine in any straightforward way, so is less concerning than other things in many respects. On that I'll agree. But as we've said, with facial recognition etc., that's about to change.
We seem casual about the amount of privacy breaching surveillance we are under on a daily basis. We seem to be up in arms about privacy when the police are involved but casual about giving our most personal details to corporations to exploit for their commercial benefit! We are watched by dozens of CCTV cameras on even the shortest journeys. We pump out our personal and intimate thoughts and details via any number of social media platforms including pictures and videos of our location without thinking. Our personal data is collected, stored, analysed, sliced, diced, traded and manipulated all day ( often without our consent and often outside of this jurisdiction/legal structure) yet the police looking at a database of your travel detail is the thin end of the wedge and the slide to the Orwellian, Stasi led, oppressive state.
But there are three issues here.
- Firstly some of us are not remotely casual about many of these things at all, and we're already deeply uncomfortable at how far down this path we have gone.
- But secondly the fact we're already a long way down this path isn't itself a reason to object to moves to move us further down it.
- And thirdly there is a big difference between what Tesco or a social media platform know about us, and what sparks the interests of the *police* about us. Tesco knowing I buy lots of cans of Coke every week isn't really a massive issue at this point [1] because what can they realistically do with that information? But coming to the attention of the police can be life-destroying as the police, by definition, have all manner of powers they can use against you.
[1] 'at this point'. If/when this data is shared with the NHS and/or insurers, for example, then maybe that would be something else you would be less keen to provide. Or alternatively when it is shared with the government to work out if you've exceeded your carbon or nitrogen ration for the week, and therefore whether you're allowed to purchase the product at all.
I just don't get it. That ship has sailed. How long do you think it would take GCHQ or the Security Service to run a file on you or me? Minutes? Looking at your travel database might reduce that by a millisecond!
While I find that uncomfortable too, you must appreciate there is quite a difference between actively running a file on a specific person, which will have been triggered by something specific happening of interest, and running data-mining on an entire database and having an algorithm extract from that a collection of people with 'unusual' behaviours.