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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I guess the point of the post in particular is the London outlier but honestly I've always found comparisons of CCTV with 'surveillance' in a meaningful sense of the term pretty cartoonish. Obviously living in London is not like living in some police state.

The same goes for China even. Public camera surveillance I think mostly does what it's supposed to do with very little intrusion into people's daily lives, in contrast to old school police stops and frisks. Travelling I've had more bad run ins with corrupt cops in Bulgaria than I had in Beijing.

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This is a critical point, that CCTV and surveillance are two different, interrelated things.

Imagine you appear on 50 different CCTV cameras on an average day. Now imagine two different scenarios:

Scenario A: Each one of these cameras is operated by a local business or property management company. The cameras record video that gets overwritten within a few days if there are no incidents or requests from law enforcement.

Scenario B: All of these cameras are on a network operated by a company with contracts for the city, law enforcement, and digital advertising networks. Facial recognition technology tracks you across all 50 locations, with an "anonymized" identifier attached to your biometrics. This identifier can be cross-referenced with other "anonymized" identifiers to build an advertising profile, while another contractor's machine learning system builds a threat profile based on movements of these identifiers, flagging outliers for human review.

Both scenarios have the same number of cameras, but I don't think many would consider the two comparable.

Worth thinking about how the scenarios converge when a few companies capture the commercial surveillance market and everything is streamed directly to a cloud storage account.

And this. Which is EXACTLY what Ring figured out and so they took all those doorbell cameras, gave local law enforcement access, and now even on residential streets there are hundreds of cameras they have easy access too.

Ring is evil and all, but since we have a problem with them one of us genius hackers should make a product that has the functionality and critically the same UX but... doesn't use the 'cloud'.

The sharing with LEO will always then be optionally and at your option, which still provides a similar net security benefit.

Purely localized home storage and IOT stuff which offers similar features like remote access and whatnot, is clearly a really, really difficult problem to solve. Just like smartphone being essentially your entire one ISP coordinated popping from having your whole life in any security agencies hands.

Maybe we need an organization like OpenAI to solve this problem. Like OpenHome or something. A place we can centralize our developer resources to providing a solution to this obvious proto-police state that is being developed out of pure utility, aka usefulness.

Right now my friends moms washing machine and coffee maker are all wifi connected to be controlled and notified when done remotely from here phone. It's entering out lives fast and we need a solution and startups offering similarlly good products - or a private solution which can be sold to the manufacturers like Whirlpool.

Doesn't Ubiquity have this functionality? I think part of the problem though is setting up the servers, which can be a bit pricey. Not many people have NASs, despite them becoming much cheaper and easier to set up. It is hard to compete with the simplicity of cloud platforms. A full home operation still requires you to have the drives stored somewhere.

I think the better solution is that someone offers a relatively cheap service that has a cloud option that fully encrypts the data and uses e2ee for communication to the server. Though it is hard to prove that you don't own the keys (I mean how many still distrust Signal?).

A while ago I had this fantasy of a marketplace for video surveillance data where people could upload geotagged (+ time, etc) recordings and get a cut of the fee when someone pays to download it for insurance claims, etc. -- probably not any less evil but more egalitarian in any case

This reminds me of the Library of Congress in Snow Crash. Lots of speculative surveillance and hacked intelligence gets uploaded to The Library where it sits waiting for someone to search for it whereby the uploader earns commission.

I'm surprised Nest, Ring, Facebook or someone else hasn't started offering free security cameras & storage to select businesses yet to accomplish better advertising data for Scenario B.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/polic...

"In most cases, when police want to search your neighborhood, they need a warrant and a reason to believe something’s amiss. Now “reasonable suspicion” is going the way of dial-up. Fifty police departments across the United States are partnering with Amazon to collect footage from people who use Ring, the company’s internet-connected doorbell. Some are offering discounted or free Ring doorbells in exchange for a pledge to register the devices with law enforcement and submit all requested footage."

I had a situation recently where I needed to talk to some people to get their footage when a crime was committed against a neighbor nearby. Of the 8 I talked to around the neighborhood and explained the situation and said "between X and Y time", only 1 showed any hesitancy at all.

I suspect most saw it as a way to help their neighbor and since I was specific, it was easy for them to check quickly and share the video if they found what I described.

I think this is really the distinction that matters to me. If access to footage was available only to trustworthy parties; that is, people the person with the camera personally knows and trusts, then I'm more or less ok with this sort of thing. The person who owns the camera should own the footage and should have to -- on a case by case basis -- decide who gets access to it.

But I'm really not comfortable with corporate entities mining their consumer devices for data to voluntarily give to the police. Incentivizing customers to give blanket permission to share all this data is unconscionable. It's especially telling that the normal path would require the police to get a judge to sign off on a warrant to get at this data.

It's funny... in another post thread people are talking about a petition to have Microsoft withdraw their membership from the RIAA (in the wake of the youtube-dl takedown fiasco). Why aren't people banding together to demand that Amazon terminate their Ring camera relationship with police?

This is similar but not the same from what I understand.

You still would be paying Ring for storage here. There is also the platform effects that once you own one, you'll buy more.

While the ethics of the Ring, neighborhood & police relationship are debatable, my thought was much less ethical & more related to reselling data for advertising purposes to cover the costs of the whole system. Such an idea seems more geared towards large city foot traffic areas with lots of eye catching items to provide data with. Shopping centers, sports stadiums, etc., would be ideal.

But they do? Verizon Smart Cities sounds like it fits the bill

https://enterprise.verizon.com/products/internet-of-things/s...

I think I'm missing how that's related. This seems like a service that you pay for that helps analyze data to solve problems. Am I mistaken?

You are right, I was reading more into it and interpret it as please install our iot tracking to slurp up your data.

Our smart parking solution is a complete solution to track and monitor parking spot occupancy using smart video cameras and computer vision analytics to enable optimization. A dashboard gives you a clear view of parking in your community while parking policy tools help you track trends and modify policies to fit your community.

I actually feel uncomfortable with both scenarios (though obviously substantially more with B). I think the question comes down to how much you trust your government/leaders (or future gov/leaders). I believe in the west distrust is correlated with the rise of authoritarianism. Which with those two correlating I'm actually more concerned because the potential for that power to be abused. I do not think the west is immune to dictators or autocrats, and far from immune to those in power abusing that power. To me surveillance hinders free speech, I mean isn't this the theme of 1984? (Many forget that it isn't that the government was always watching, but could.) It makes it more difficult to vocalize our feelings about abuse of power and makes it difficult to share messages conveying as much. We should feel free to communicate and criticize, and surveillance is one means to suppress that communication.

B is not a hypothetical -- Link NYC monoliths have overlapping lines of sight for thousands of locations in New York, in addition to recording MAC addresses from every passing phone.

And their records can be accessed without oversight.

Seems like China already uses tracking across their cameras, during the beginning of Covid in Feb/March there was a story of a guy who got told to quarantine because he was near an infected, but one day he went to a lake, and the next day police showed up at his place...

In Moscow, you can track people if you have a good photo of them and a couple of hundred dollars in crypto

https://novayagazeta.ru/news/2020/09/17/164324-roskomsvoboda...

Do this level of advertisements really work? Ie, reflect into more sales?

This level of information about individuals can be very valuable for political purposes. It can and probably has been used to influence elections and political power.

The latter scenario is shockingly easy to build with modern cloud services. I once built a toy example that would track a given face through all the public camera streams in my city (Berlin) in a two day hackathon (and we all know how little coding gets done at those). And just like that, stalking is obsolete.

It's one of the only times in my life I've elected NOT to open source my work. As trivial as it was to build, I don't want to contribute anything at all to that creepy mess.

That was three years ago. My key takeaway: just assume scenario B is happening already.

> London is not like living in some police state

I lived there for 7 years and I don't share the same feelings. Sure it's not like you live in 1984 but it feels much more like a "police state" in comparison to the rest European capitals.

You can get tossed in prison for saying the "wrong thing", which strikes me as a pretty police state thing.

Examples:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-man-jailed-over-facebook-sta...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-face...

https://thesuffolkjournal.com/26253/opinion/detainment-of-br...

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/count-dankula-freedom-s...

In the context of London and the UK “get tossed in prison” has an alternative meaning

>On Feb. 9, The Daily Mail in the U.K. published a story detailing the harrowing detainment of 38-year-old Kate Scottow. Scottow, a resident of Hertfordshire, England, was handcuffed in front of her autistic ten-year-old daughter and breastfeeding 20-month-old son, brought into custody and held for seven hours in a single jail cell.

>What heinous action warranted such drastic measures? The crime of “misgendering,” or calling a transgender individual by their biologically determined set of pronouns instead of their preferred pronouns, precipitated Scottow’s arrest. Stephanie Hayden, a biological male who recently transitioned to identifying as female on social media, reported Scottow to the police.

If you would have tried to tell people 10 years ago that this actually happened, people would have thought you were crazy, or accuse you of promoting the slippery slope fallacy.

As a major believer in respecting pronoun usage it's ridiculous this is a crime.

The article makes it sound like she just accidentally used the wrong word, but in actually, she was repeatedly harassing the person and breaking what appears to be some sort of restraining order to do so. Whether an arrest is warranted is another question, but as always, it's a little less ridiculous with context.

Perhaps they would simply level an accusation of credulously accepting the Daily Mail's endless sewer of confected outrage fantasy.

Fair enough; here's another site that appears to be approaching it from the opposite perspective: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/02/14/kate-scottow-stephanie...

Different spin, for sure, but the facts appear to be the same. I'd have posted multiple sources if I knew this would be contended. Here's another article on it: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/i-stand-with-kate-scotto...

If you'd told me 10 years ago that someone would be arrested for hate speech, I'd have ... believed you?

> Examples:

> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-man-jailed-over-facebook-sta...

So a guy posted "grossly offensive" or "of an indecent, obscene or menacing character", and infuriated everyone around him to the point that he had to be arrested "for his own safety,"

> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-face...

Legislation passed to prosecute racist hate speech.

> https://thesuffolkjournal.com/26253/opinion/detainment-of-br...

A woman was arrested due to her “willfully and maliciously engages in a knowing pattern of conduct or series of acts over a period of time directed at a specific person".

> https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/count-dankula-freedom-s...

An opinion piece that just shows someone's opinion.

You should pick your examples more carefully because all you did was try to pass off people actively engaged in systematic abuse and harassment and persecution of vulnerable people as victims.

I got the similar vibe even just passing though. I’ve seen the “secure beneath the watchful eyes” poster in real life: http://www.adsavvy.org/new-cctv-posters-in-uk-train-stations...

Anecdotal, but in my experience living in London, CCTV does fuck all. I've been robbed / stolen from multiple times in London, all caught on CCTV, never once helpful in apprehending any criminals or getting my possessions back to me.

And clearly not a great deterrent, as I've been the victim of more crimes in London than anywhere else.

I’m sorry to hear about your experience, but have you considered that this was a reasonable outcome of a cost-benefit analysis?

It’s a time-consuming and costly process to collect, review and pursue CCTV evidence.

If you’re the victim of a relatively minor property crime (e.g. having your phone or laptop stolen) it’s probably not worth the police pursuing it.

If, on the other hand, you are the victim of serious violent crime (murder, attempted murder, rape, assault, etc.), the police most certainly do trawl the area for cameras, request footage, review and identify suspects, issue appeals, etc.

> Obviously living in London is not like living in some police state.

In recent years, the police in London had a policy to harass anyone who was seen using a camera in a large, but completely unpublished, geofenced region of the city. That's not US/China/Saudi-level police state bad--as in, the UK police aren't able to arbitrarily confiscate cash or shoot people with impunity for having the wrong skin color--but it's bad enough that I consider such behavior a feature of a police state.

Any jurisdiction where it's not possible to perform the normal functions of everyday life, including creating works of art through photography, without fear of hostile police interaction is to some degree or other a police state.

Is that this case, from 10 years ago?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/dec/15/yates-police-terr...

I've had a couple of run-on this front. I spent a couple of years photographing industrial landscapes in London. Unless you are trespassing then you can tell them to hop it. Being arrested wrongfully is quite profitable for the receiver of the arrest and they are usually intimidated by reminding them of that in return.

> and they are usually intimidated by reminding them of that

Would I be wrong to assume you say that from a position of middle class white privilege? (A position I also hold, but from which I have significant empathy with those who do not.)

I'm guessing intimidating police by reminding them of the laws they're supposed to uphold works a lot less well for young black kids.

Yes on both counts. The latter is a travesty and a very real problem.

I don't think it works well for any race in North America. Unless you are the mayor or some powerful police union boss I see a local beatdown occuring and/or finding a reason for a charge.

The police in the UK are exceptionally unlikely to shoot you, whatever your colour, leaving you free to pursue your wrongful arrest case with a side-order of claiming it was racially motivated via either (mostly) free legal aid or a number of specialist no-win-no-fee lawyers.

>I'm guessing intimidating police by reminding them of the laws they're supposed to uphold works a lot less well for young black kids.

Undoubtedly, but there is a power in knowing what and how to say something. I've been arrested and had to sit with three other unrelated individuals for a while, as we waited to be processed. We were all white but I really felt the treatment I received was significantly better than my two fellow arrestees and that was entirely down to not sounding...well, like an idiot. Even asking to read the Police "Codes of Practice" - which is offered automatically - was met with unease (and slight embarrassment) because it's apparently rare for people to say yes to that and they didn't have it to hand immediately.

You can call this a class benefit but I certainly wasn't dressed in a middle class manner (which is possibly why I was stopped initially) and my accent is fairly typical for South East London.

Yeah, I'm a motorcycle sports bike rider, so the police are my <David Attenborough voice>natural enemy...

It's kinda well known amongst my riding peers that some people "fail the attitude test" and end up way worse off than people who're at least polite and businesslike when pulled over. I've rarely "talked my way out of a ticket", but I've watched people talk themselves into 3 or 4 serious tickets where they could have "settled" for just the one relatively minor they deserved.

(I _did_ managed to escape without a ticket in San Francisco once, doing 100mph past a cop car on the Bay Bridge on a borrowed noisy piped Honda VTR1000 with a girl on the back wearing a blindingly white pure muppet fur jacket and a big fluffy glow-in-the-dark tule tutu. The cop car didn't trigger my normally well honed "cop radar" because in my head it was just a "movie cop car", not a real Australian Ford/Holden mortal enemy carrying sedan with our local highway patrol markings, so I just kinda obliviously cruised past him in fairly light 2am traffic into town. He light up his disco lights so I pulled over at the nearest exit, pulled my helmet off to reveal a grey-beard most likely older than his dad, and said in my broadest and fairly exaggerated Aussie accent "G'Day mate!" and told him "I was only doing about 100!" to which he said "Miles, you're not driving in kilometres now", and let me go with a warning to "ride safe, OK?" Pretty sure that was part middle aged white privilege combined with "way too much paperwork booking an Australian", with a little but of "Australians? We _love_ you guys!" cultural luck thrown in for good measure... But I'll take that rare win against them :-) )

Hopefully next time you're riding recklessly and putting other lives in danger, which it sounds like you do often, they throw the book at you.

I totally get that some people won't agree with me here...

To me, the rules are "advisory" and attempt to accomplish the actual social contract goal of "keeping other road users safe". The intended goal is safety - the rules codify more or less effective practices to achieve that goal. The rules are inevitably fairly blunt instruments setting limitations based on generalisations or lowest common denominator assumptions. A semi trailer doing 50 has a much greater risk of endangering other road users than a motorcycle doing 100. The bike has shorter stopping distances, better manoeuvrability, can evade other vehicles through much smaller gaps - and most importantly a motorcycle rider has a significantly higher motivation to "not get it wrong" due to the enormously higher risk of self injury in any accident. Car/truck driver mostly need to deal with insurance companies. I need to deal with being turned into road jam.

Assuming I was being "reckless" or "putting other lives in danger" because I was doing 100 in fairly light 2am Bay Bridge traffic (which was all doing 80 or so anyway) screams of mindlessly adhering to rules without any concern for the goals of the rules and the desired outcomes.

I'm most likely overestimating my own skill and safety, because everybody does - even people who understand that everybody does, but I've got about a million km of motorcycle riding over 30 years during which I've injured _zero_ other people to back up my side of this argument.

I also totally accept the fact that my disregard to being a stickler to the rules means one day I may "get the book thrown at me". I'd also point out that the cop in the incident recounted above should (and would) have done so if he considered me to be "riding recklessly and putting other lives in danger", and he chose not to. Apart from the Treasure Island entrances/exits, the Bay Bridge has no intersections or driveways where unexpected vehicles might enter, has great sightlines to see slow or stationary traffic from long long distances, and often has traffic flowing at 70 or 80. There are definitely times/places on that bridge where doing 100 is clearly not "reckless" - although I totally understand some people's subjective opinion of reckless is no doubt different to mine, and the minisucle increase in risk to there road users of a motorcycle moving through light traffic at 20mph faster than everyone else on that stretch of road could for some people cross over into recklessness.

(I also admit I have a somewhat risk-happy personality, and view a lot of things differently to my more risk averse friends. I would be astounded to discover my personality trait there was not shared by a majority of HN readers. You don't dream of starting or working for "swing for the fences" disruptive startups if you're a rules stickler. Maybe my "enjoy riding fast on the road while accounting for others safety" has crossed over into the Uber-style-evil rules flaunting. I don't think so, but I bet Kalanick doesn't think that either, and he's wrong - so maybe I am too...)

Funny how only the safe and responsible motorbike riders post on hn/reddit... Very rare to see one on the road though.

Yeah - I'll totally give you that one. The hobby certainly attracts a higher than average level of fuckwits. (And I may well be kidding myself presuming I'm not one of them.)

I like to think you'd rarely even notice me on the road though, I'm rarely flamboyant or behaving unexpectedly in traffic (even though pre-covid I commuted every day by bike), and my rule-breaking (these days at least, I will admit for being stupider when younger) is mostly reserved for non main highway out of town backroads, or late night/early morning mostly empty roads.

I think the problem is that the infrastructure is being being built up. Even if they aren’t using the cameras right now for surveillance, the infrastructure is ready to be used be a bad actor in the future. I think that’s the real risk of building this up.

Not saying that surveillance is right, but I've lived in London for a year and a half and never felt this way, I don't think I've ever talked to someone who felt this way there, you must be a very paranoid individual.

I will say this though: having lived in both Beijing and London, I've always felt ultra safe (and I lived in London during some terrorist attacks). On the other hand, I lived in SF for the same time and I never felt safe there, avoiding walks at night, avoiding public transport for the most part, avoiding some streets, etc. I also lived in Chicago and I felt much worse there (at least in SF I could still take walks).

Would London or Beijing turn into a Chicago or SF if it weren’t for CCTV?

Would Chi or SF become a London or Beijing with CCTV?

Doubtful to both. But a lot can be explained by social determinants of wealth and what that turns people into.

Why is baby’s response flagged and dead ?!?!?? He literally just gave his perspective as a person living in that city. The people that flagged them should be banned from this site.

I assume they took offence with the "you must be very paranoid" just because someone feels odd about surveillance. It certainly seems pretty rude to me.

> I also lived in Chicago and I felt much worse there (at least in SF I could still take walks).

Depends where you are and what times.

3am on the redline in the northside.. Be ready to move at a moments notice.

On the other hand, although I find driving in SF much more stressful and confusing than London(despite being a native RHT driver), I never managed to get a ticket in SF. Every time I visit London I keep getting letters with some bullshit traffic violation captured by a camera for months after I am back.

Also having lived in London for 7 years, I can't say I felt safe walking at night other than in the very central places. Try visiting Elephant and Castle or Seven Sisters alone during the night.

Edit: spelling

> although I find driving in SF much more stressful and confusing than London(despite being a native RHT driver), I never managed to get a ticket in SF.

Did you ever park outside a parking garage?

Did you enter the congestion zone without paying?

That's fined pretty swiftly.

> Try visiting Elephant and Castle or Seven Sisters alone during the night.

Did that many times, it was fine? Only place I've ever felt unsafe was Brentford after I got hassled there.

Not to discount your feelings completely, but I’m always a little skeptical when someone says a place “feels” safe or unsafe. Do you have reason to believe you actually were less safe in San Francisco compared to London?

My first two weeks in SF I took the bus twice, the first time a group of kids started slapping random people, I was prepared to fight and protect my SO but they didn't get to me; the second time some guy just ran and took a girl's phone, she grabbed to it for what seemed like a full minute, screaming and shit, then finally let go... I was paralyzed, especially after the event of the previous week, after that I vouched not to ever take the bus again in SF.

After that some homeless people screamed at me, some tried to punch me slowly (easy to avoid), I got used to it with time but it's still not a nice feeling to take walks. I wouldn't let my SO walk alone at 3AM through the streets for example (while I would have no problems with that in London or Beijing).

Murder rate in London, including terrorism: 1.6 per 100,000.

Murder rate in San Francisco: 5.17 per 100,000.

I think non-CCTV plastered European cities is probably a more apt comparison than Chicago and San Francisco, two cities that have a reputation for being unsafe in the US (which has major problems with violent crime across the board).

> This is not obvious to me. London subjectively feels like an oppressively surveilled and policed city to me any time I spend time there, and avoid it for that reason.

Spend some time in a real autocracy, then see if you feel the same way.

> I've always found comparisons of CCTV with 'surveillance' in a meaningful sense of the term pretty cartoonish

I think your experience is related to class. When I read your comment I think - ok they must be a Petty Bourgeoisie or Bourgeoisie.

CCTV is used to catch and punish so called 'criminals'. But when many public spaces and parks in London have been sold off/privatized[1], and the Commons has been plundered everywhere (IP, knowledge, etc.)[2], the laws punishing 'theft' are pretty laughable to me. In my research lately, I've been coming to the conclusion that maybe the ones who are making the laws are the real criminals.

There are systemic thefts taking place: the slow privatization of public lands, the pay-to-play dynamics of modern day law, and the plunder of the educational and knowledge Commons through Intellectual Monopoly - making human curiousity illegal.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/05/revealed-how-...

[2] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/plunder-commons-...

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