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Comment by bhayden | Hacker News Reader

The issue isn't that people are suffering direct financial loss or bodily harm due to surveillance. The issue is that it enables authoritarian and repressive governments. You lose your privacy. Anything you do is essentially public information and can be used against you. As shitty as it is, people should have the right to do something like cheat on their spouse without some government official waving the evidence in your face for compliance. Or maybe you're into weird porn, or you read/write embarrassing things on the internet, or you're having sex with your second cousin, or you're gay but also a Christian minister. People shouldn't have to live in fear of their legal actions being used against them.

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Police states don't exist because they have huge numbers of police officers, but because large parts of the population collude with them.

So, while the UK isn't an authoritarian police state it does have too many CCTV cameras and a large segment of the public likes them. This thread has had people asking for more CCTV; other threads suggested the local authorities using CCTV and human surveillance to check that people applying for a school place lived in the catchment area for that school.

We have a very large police DNA database and we see people resist attempts to scale it back. You even sometimes see large groups of people volunteer to have their DNA taken to rule themselves out of a high profile crime. And that's even though we know that a DNA database should probably have as many profiles of criminals as possible, and a s few profiles of non-criminals as possible, just because data handling.

> As shitty as it is, people should have the right to do something like cheat on their spouse without some government official waving the evidence in your face for compliance.

A lot of these avenues of privacy were only really enabled by the growth of large metropolitan areas.

In smaller districts, you can't go to the inn and sleep with another woman because the innkeeper went to highschool with you and will tell your wife.

For the vast majority of human society, you had to try a lot harder to hide your activities if you wanted to go against the current social mores. It's not really clear to me that the level of privacy we can easily attain today, even if it is a social good, is not outweighed by the group benefits of social cohesion, and newly found benefits of catching criminals after the fact that CCTV would provide/encourage.

The difference is that the inn keeper, a single person with no authority, a small social network, and a visual range measured in feet, is replaced by an invisible, omniscient, omnipresent organisation with the power to bring arbitrary legal troubles down on your head.

Only if all CCTV were to become publicly viewable at all times by everyone could we speak of it as a force for social cohesion, rather than a mechanism for amplifying differences in power.

What I understand is that in Britain, for most cases CCTV is actually owned by private companies---like a shop will have a CCTV that watches its alleyway.

Even in the case where CCTV is owned by the government, its operated by individual city districts.

It's not a singular invisible omniscient organization.

The type of people in favour of CCTV are likely to be "intellectually unrefined" and probably in favour of CCTV being an impediment to the actions you mentioned.

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