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Comment by detritus | Hacker News Reader

My local corner shop has about 16 CCTV cameras in it, covering as many angles in the shop as they can. This is common. Very common.

I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves.

The oft-regurgitated "x cameras per thousand people" narrative tends to overlook obviousness like this.

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Imagine each one of those cameras were being held by a person. How would you react then? This is the true nature of the situation.

Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.

The video on those systems usually is turned over every month. The video isn’t accessed unless there was an event.

These systems aren’t integrated into larger systems to help track and ID people.

That said, some of this could change if many shops go to nest or ring solutions... but most shop owners will not keep video footage indefinitely in the cloud as it’d be cost prohibitive.

Yep. That's exactly the kind of rationalization I'm talking about. You don't know any of that for sure for each machine camera and certainly don't know what a random person will do with a taken video.

Amazing how you got downvotes for that. I was just thinking why some people reacted so aggressively towards the guy filming. And tbh he behaves really annoyingly. If he really wanted to teach people a lesson about constant surveillance this certainly doesn't play in his favour.

But I think it also has to do with the fact that at least with him people actually have someone to be mad about. As opposed to their usual mode of surveillance where they are being filmed by a 'security' camera (hey, it's security people! nevermind if it doesn't actually make anything any safer) operated and owned probably by their boss or someone who they are not on equal grounds with.

It makes me kind of sad.

Do you think the people being filmed would've behaved less aggressively if the camera man had told them that he only keeps footage for a month, doesn't run tracking and ID-ing software on it and only ever re-watches it when there was 'an event'?

I bet the moment unlimited storage is cheap, shop owners will do it.

people hate being watched

So what's the deal with the selfie obsession and the instagram obsession and so on? Is it that people dislike being watched live? Or is it that people dislike other people having control of the footage?

I don't understand that, either. I don't use instagram, nor do I take "selfies"; I regard both as profoundly narcissistic, privacy concerns aside.

That said, the reason people get depressed by platforms like instagram is that they don't show real life but a photo-shopped, re-touched, carefully-curated version of life. People only see what others allow them to see.

Furthermore, I know that most of the footage taken by a surveillance camera is discarded. Most of the footage filmed by humans is created for a specific purpose and will be used. Someone else will likely watch it.

Finally, if I walk into a grocery store with a camera, I am going into someone else's establishment informed. If someone walks into a classroom and films me (like in the "Surveillance Camera Man" videos), there was no such agreement, implicit or otherwise.

I really do hate being watched, and hate others taking video. I hope surveillance cameras go out of use, and people stop recording everything on phones. However, there is a difference between that and some silly two-bit social network.

I'd say it's the latter. The selfie obsession is all about curating how you present yourself and your lifestyle. No one would want an IG or Facebook account with someone else at the helm.

> people hate being watched

in the old days we'd have God watching over our conscience.

now we have cctv.

Crime never occurred in the good old god fearing days, huh?

Crime doesn't occur these days, huh?

Funny how some people choose to react when the concept of 'God' is dropped into a response, irrespective of the author's belief or sincerity.

I prefer god. He at least doesn't talk to other people about his observations.

I prefer CCTV. Then we can actually go look at the footage and see what really happened, instead of arguing pointlessly and having no neutral reference.

I helped build a product a while back that helped those owners give access to the local police. Depending on what the owner wanted to do this could be just the street cameras or everything.

Do you sleep well at night?

No personal attacks please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry you see that as personal attack. It is not mean to be directed to one person. It is mostly against the lack of ethics in the profession at large.

I can understand less and less how other programmers can do this kind of work.

Everyone got to put food on the table, but if the money comes from destroying personal freedom, I could not sleep at night and I would take any other job.

Actually I do. I don't feel bad about writing any legal software. If laws suck they should be changed.

Mind showing me a camera that you can definitively say the government (or other actors) don't have the potential for backdoor access to?

I certainly can't.

Nope, and in case of crime, most local police forces can simply walk into local stores and request recordings from the last X days, so quite why they'd need illicit backdoors, I don't know.

I'm also entirely fine with this.

Backdoors in cheap CCTV being accessed illicitly at a mass-level is an entirely different problem, and one which I'd agree would need questioning.

I doubt there's much value in that concern for another decade, until the majority of CCTV cameras are ultra high resolution/30+fps, which they're not.

Not to mention camera technology that only records “junkies and thieves” and not the thousands of innocent people going about their day. There is nothing ok about pervasive, constant surveillance of law abiding people.

Any CCTV system that's air-gapped from the internet (records to local storage only) reasonably meets this definition.

Yes, there are possible exfil paths, but not ones that can reasonably be executed on a large scale. Realistically, the danger from break-in and hard drive theft (or warrant/subpoena) is greater for the average user.

Raspberry Pi Camera Module?

Unless you believe governments have backdoored SSH, I would say it's good. Definitely not a turnkey solution though.

That sort of acceptance is why amazons ring is so dangerous: there are new business models around aggregating and automatically processing and mining that footage

Wouldn't be hard to hook them all up to the government's backend, if it one day became mandated. For safety.

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