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Comment by cladopa | Hacker News Reader

I see that as a dystopian future. Google wants to model entire cities in real time, just like London with all the cameras everywhere, but for the profit of a private company and three letter agencies.

It used to be that in a small village everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Now with cloud connected cameras it will be impossible to have privacy on cities. A google camera will see and follow you anywhere you go. They will recognise you, they will track your movement when you go out of reach of one camera into another.

That is too much power and we should not give it to anyone, public or private.

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This sounds to me like the most straightforward trying to solve social problems with (blocking) technological solutions.

You'll only stop that future by securing a democratic government and have it protect citizens with solid privacy protection. Fighting technology is an already lost battle (we already have the means at scale)

The battle was lost when a generation of kids grew up posting all their photos to Facebook and its successors, normalizing a new attitude to privacy.

It is not only London.

CCTV is everywhere in UK.

Two decades past, here in Australia, I worked on a proposal for a another party to develop uniform ubiquitous CCTV software infrastructure for the UK as part of a tender process.

The people I worked for literally tagged it in house as Panopticon.

Big brother social objections aside the one feature I like was ironing out the wrinkles on buses exchanging their most recent footage whenever they parked up at a stop or at lights within wireless range.

The driving intent, at theat time. as I was told, was to be sure to have useful footage survive in the event of another wave of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

I parted ways not long after that initial period as I expected things to drift in the direction of "Well, now that we have this, how can we use it to increasingly track people other than actual terrorists?"

Yeah, I don't like the "it's OK to have tyranny for everyone if it means we prevent a few deaths a decade" choice that's constantly being made.

I wish we could just ban CCTV cameras in public areas (banned for use by private or government entities), as the privacy tradeoff is immense.

There's a UK show called Hunted where contestants go on the run and are chased by law enforcement.

It is amazing to see just how quickly they are found because of the all the CCTV cameras.

I can imagine.

Many years ago I use to regularly be in southern UK, between London and Cardiff, I think never saw a bad parked car at least in the city center, exactly because there are always a bunch of cameras around.

No way to try out one's luck regarding if a patrol will ever happen to cross that street.

Honestly we are already there with all the doorbell cameras people have.

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