SDSU Wired Its Dorms with 1,300 AI Cameras Without Telling Students | Hacker News Reader

SDSU Wired Its Dorms with 1,300 AI Cameras Without Telling Students

reclaimthenet.org

54 pointsiamnothere19 comments

Open articleView on HN

“an area open to public use, where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists”

becomes:

“an area open to public use, where reasonable expectation of no privacy exists”

Surely the citizens will be on their best behavior. Wait ... that was China's government, that statement, no?

Can't believe I only got as far as 11am before thinking about Larry Ellison

Not suggesting this is okay, but the 1,300 "AI Cameras" are placed in "classroom buildings, bookstores, dining areas, parking structures, gyms and the residence halls".

Reading the title suggested to me that the cameras were installed even in the doom rooms, but this isn't the case. The article reads a bit strange "and the residence halls where students sleep." but the students don't sleep in the hall, they sleep in rooms adjacent to the hall.

the word hall, when used in this context, means the entire building, not the hallways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Student_accommoda...

The whole expectation of privacy argument is so obtuse.

If I find you in public and start staring at you and following you everywhere without ever going away, including camping out at the door of every private space you enter and exit. You will absolutely have a problem with it. We even have a word for it and laws about it.

The fact that the barista saw you at the coffee shop and your roomate saw you at the library and the book store has an ordinary security camera are nothing remotely equivelant.

One is stalking, even harassment, and the others are not.

Agreed.

Scale is what matters.

Being in public and being incidently recorded or photographed by a set of separate, independent recorders is substantially different than an all seeing panopticon, controlled one entity who can collate, analyse, track, trace through time (maybe years back).

It's not you who determines guilt. And surveillance is more likely to be used against you for minor asinine things (if only to justify its own existence), than used for you in major incidents it is claimed to be installed for.

With a one or two shots of facial recognition working your entire existence can be tracked from when you appeared on first camera to the last one. Even if at some points your face is not identified.

Now combine this to all other data like say payments and well even more identifying points are in the data... Local only video records is entirely different game than being tracked for your whole day...

The cheapest DIY drone that is able to effectively carry and use a glass breaker is like 25 bucks in material.

Why would anyone carry a palm-size non-traceable drone with a glass breaker on campus you might ask. Are they going to break the cameras? Of course not, that’s highly illegal.

Students care deeply about the wellbeing of fellow students and professors, just like the University seems to care so much that they installed AI cameras for 1.3 mil USD. Safety first.

What if one of your fellow students crashes their car on campus and needs to be rescued in style? Evaluate explosion risk, decide to break glass with the drone from a safe distance, then quickly move in to cut the seat belt and extract the crashed driver.

Drones are cool tech, students at SDSU should experiment with them way more and establish their presence on campus. Maybe even make a nationwide university sport out of it. National Drone Rescue Championships anyone?

I would think it would be hard to hit the lens.

Nice try, FBI, but as I said, those drones are for smashing car windows in an emergency, not to damage government / private property.

Also, theoretically, unlike with a smoking car wreck, you would have basically unlimited chances to find the right angle for the lens if you tried.

Who’s going to stop you? The campus security drone defence squad?

Most likely, some middle-aged dude will try to angrily yell at it and hit it with a mop, miss it a few times, then yell some more, and it goes viral on TikTok. But doing crime is bad, so don’t ever destroy an AI camera.

SDSU stands for San Diego State University

Sounds like security cameras.

I'll bet they installed smoke detectors and emergency lighting and all sorts of other things without telling students either.

I had my PS2 stolen from a dorm at the other SD university. More security cameras would have been a great thing at the time.

More cameras does not equal more security. They aren't put there to protect your property in the same way that HR departments don't exist to protect employees.

No, they're put there to collect grainy images of the perpetrator to distribute after the shooting. It's sad/ineffectual, but still far less nefarious than TFA makes it sound.

What’s the other SD university?

There's also the principle of proportionality.

Is this institution's campus such a dangerous / crime-ridden area that it warrants 1,300 cameras to track everyone everywhere @ all times? Hmm...

Right. 1,300 cameras for over 50,000 people in a hundred or so multi-story buildings spread over a couple of hundred acres...seems proportionate. It's maybe a dozen cameras per building on average?

I'm not a fan of surveillance per se, but acting like this is disproportionate is just silly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com