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Comment by evx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of surveillance cameras but I think they are different because they are passive.

People don't feel threatened by surveillance cameras because they think no one is watching that video 24/7 and it is used if something goes wrong or needs investigation.

Where as some random guy suddenly walking in with a camera makes them think that person must have some immediate and possibly malicious intention.

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Fixed surveillance cameras might seem passive, but they really are typically more intrusive than this guy's project. That's what makes it so interesting to me. I totally understand how it'd be creepy to have someone physically walking around recording me, but in reality, a campus-wide set of "passive" surveillance cameras (say, at my workplace) will gather far more information about me than this guy could ever hope to record on his own.

Yeah I agree and with improvements in the technology it will get even worse. Cameras can already have pretty decent microphones and speech-to-text technology is pretty damn good so I wont be surprised if soon they start recording sound and analysing it in realtime. It wont cost all that much compared to a lot of other things.

However I was only trying to explain the behaviour of the people.

I think your assessment is right. Furthermore, I believe the intent of the video is to get people to question why these perceptions exist.

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