China to have 626M surveillance cameras within 3 years
technode.com
technode.com
Connecting to these devices requires one level of indirect - where I connect first to an internal machine that can send packets to/from the hidden subnet.
"Hikvision has been expanding in the Americas where it now has 8.5% of the market, putting it in the No.2 position. The Chinese government owns a 42% stake of Hikvision, according to a piece by the Wall Street Journal earlier this month on the security concerns of Chinese-made cameras being used in the US."
Article here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/surveillance-cameras-made-by-ch...
As such I doubt worlds intelligence services, or organized crime, need to target any of these cheap webcam companies specifically.
[0] https://www.ispyconnect.com/userguide-default-passwords.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Espionage_and_security_...
There are abundant parallels between the Huawei situation a few years ago and the Hikvision situation now.
Purpose matters.
Maybe public surveillance camera help preventing armed attacks (but it's never really been a thing in China anyway, and in serious decline in the world in general) and I doubt they can do much more. As you say, purpose matters.
I don't believe crime stops with surveillance, it changes.
Edit: one thing I forgot to mention, I feel the Chinese state media are doing a very good job at not talking too much about the different crime/problems happening. Western media are doing pretty much the opposite. I think on that precise point, if other method than censorship were used, it's actually a pretty good thing and do make people feel safer.
In China, I had a traffic altercation (between me, a pedestrian, and some people who were in a car at the time the altercation started). The police found the video footage and watched it within an hour after I reported it.
My point: the plural of anecdote is not data.
The point about many of these privacy related issues is that purpose can change.
Almost nobody is arguing that it's not a good goal to feel safe on the streets. But there can be an argument made that cameras don't actually increase safety (though they can increase the illusion of safety) and the more important point: Increased safety is only one purpose of many of these cameras. Even if it is the only one right now, all it takes is a shift in political climate, and suddenly they can be used for many other things without, and this is the important bit, changing anything about the cameras themselves.
To take up your example of being feeling safe as a Chinese in China (but don't misunderstand me, this is exactly the same in any other country!) probably works because you are not interesting to the people controlling the cameras (and the other surveillance ). But once you aren't aligned with their interests anymore and you start making trouble, these cameras give your opponents tremendous power over you.
Privacy doesn't matter if you are aligned with those in power. The power imbalance it perpetuates only starts mattering as you move away from the center of society.
So I suspect violence is affected much more by culture/policy than cameras. Surely cameras may help, but for them to work one already needs a functional society. For example, cameras do not work when one can bribe police/courts to remove/ignore video evidence, like it happens in Russia.
I think one interesting thing I saw at GTC two years ago, was a Chinese firm was building software to watch / track where everyone went through a city. Including what they were doing. This is not a "safety tool" it's a surveillance tool. Sure it can be used to _maybe_ track down attackers after it happens. However, it can be used more effectively to track potential or known dissidents or track what the average person in the population is doing.
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/china-billio...
[2] https://thediplomat.com/2016/06/china-the-us-and-extrajudici...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/17/china-behaving...
for crime it's great, but if you're a dissident they also know where you've been, or hackers can sell your schedule to unscrupulous people if it's not secure.
Will some AI monitor all the feeds and flag suspicious activities to the local authorities?
- Activity detection. If something interesting is happening in front of a camera (e.g. two people running in front of a camera middle of the night), AI detects that and pops the view up in front of humans for further action. Because less than 1% of cameras contain any useful info at any moment, they don't need that many humans to watch those cameras live.
- Face recognition. For many cameras, Face capture and recognition is running live and report any criminals or targeted personnel to police.
- Footage markup. If police need to go through the camera footage manually, the recording playback can skip the uninteresting parts to save time.
Combining these with unrestricted real-time integration of other data sources, such as real time GPS from mobile apps, cell tower call history from telecoms, network traffic inspection and remote spying capabilities, Chinese police forces can pretty much find anybody very quickly. They are also known to have state of the art big data platforms developed in house.
One anecdote I read: Somebody killed a person in a small city middle of the night, removed battery of his phone, ran to his car parked on street, drove a couple of hundred miles to another middle sized city, only to be caught in a motel next morning. How? Complete camera footage covering his walking path, vehicle plate tracking all the way to his destination, and motel check-in system that is also integrated with police.
The IRA (or their reactionary counterparts) are who you should blame for the amount of CCTV in London, but it all comes from the same place. If it wasn't them, it would have been something else.
My first memory of surveillance in any kind of large-scale was in the early 1990s, well before Tony Blair. It was when the Met police put up the "Ring of Steel" around the centre of London to stop the volunteers blowing things up.
Anyway, too much surveillance bad. Unless they use it to find your phone, in which case too much surveillance good. One might think it's somewhat of a nuanced issue!
If anyone is curious "The British Security Industry Association (BSIA) estimates there are between 4-5.9 million cameras"
Given the population, there are actually more cameras per UK citizen than there are per Chinese citizen.
The vast majority either do not work, or are privately owned and when enquired about (difficult in itself as there are so many parties to contact once the owner is identified, and they likely do not have direct access and need to speak to someone else) have extremely useless retention periods that meant no footage survived enough time to request it.