I documented every surveillance camera on my way to work in New York City

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-security-cameras-in-new-york-city-2019-12

by grumpypoet • 7 years ago

51 49 7 years ago

Quite ironic to post this piece of journalism on one of the worst offenders on tracking and personalised advertisements. I can see more than 20 scripts without even having anything enabled. Set your own house in order before judging the government.

akie• 7 years ago

Set your own house in order before judging the government.

Why?

Out_of_Characte4• 7 years ago

Because its hypocritical to expect the governement to not use tools and data analytics to improve 'user experience/citizen's well being' while being guilty of the exact same behaviour.

dont wait for others to do the right thing, get your own house in order, then help the rest of the world.

phil_folrida• 7 years ago

You have to admit it is a bit ironic to speak about cameras surveillance on a page where ublock origin count 19 trackers.

Government or not.

superqwert• 7 years ago

Government? Most of these camera owners weren't government.

Out_of_Characte4• 7 years ago

Maybe I should have clarified because it seems obvious. In my country you can't point a camera at anything that isn't your property. Which means you can't point it in a way that you can see your neighbours, or on a public street. You're not being filmed or recorded at all times and if you are, you know exactly who is doing it. This is properly enforced in almost all cases exept highways, some public libraries and entrances of public/gov buildings. Tracking is still pervasive and slowly creeping up.

danaris• 7 years ago

It is not OK to require people to be 100% "Pure" before seeking to improve the world around them.

Hypocrites who seek to make the government do better things even when they're doing similar bad things are still seeking to make the government do better things.

The morality of an act of activism does not change based on the personal failings of the person engaging in it. (It can change based on the intentions of that person—eg, if the thing they're trying to get the government to do would also make it easier for them to get away with currently-illegal/immoral acts, but that's a separate issue from mere hypocrisy.)

vermarish• 7 years ago

Content aside, this article is really well formatted. Going photo by photo, camera by camera puts me in the shoes of the author, and frankly gives me the same feeling I had when I first read 1984 (especially when he mentioned the sky was fittingly grey).

arethuza• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure that in 1984 only a relatively small part of the population, the Inner Party, were constantly monitored.

mbel• 7 years ago

Not quite, but you are close. It wasn't the whole population in 1984 that was monitored. Inner Party members were monitored, but could turn off telescreens. Outer Party members had to have them on all the time. Proles weren't monitored. The idea was to monitor middle class as it was considered to be necessary for lower class to revolt. Upper class had no reason to revolt as they were in power.

I'm leaving this comment mostly for people downvoting OP.

polymatter• 7 years ago

Its more than a decade since I last read it, but I am fairly sure the point was everyone was monitored. There was no escape.

gdhbcc• 7 years ago

I just country the number of cameras i saw while going to lunch from my office. It's an under 300 meter walk, and I saw 16 cameras, in a supposedly privacy friendly country like Germany.

rbinv3• 7 years ago

Which city?

licebmi__at__• 7 years ago

One thing that I always wondered is if people just ignore the cameras.

Once I got called for questioning on a local retail store, since I was with enough free time and a good mood, so I just went with it. So the reason I was called was that the security guard noticed that I was looking at all security cameras which made me seem suspicious, my only answer was "well they're distracting".

Anyway there was no other irregularity and even the manager thought that the guard was being over zealous, but I was left wondering if other people are not uncomfortable around so many cameras. That this journalist seems surprised makes me think that maybe other people aren't even aware of them.

esotericn4• 7 years ago

In the UK there are advertisements on the public transport network that recommend reporting suspicious activity.

One of them has a 'plotline' of someone who's taking a photo of a camera. "Are they checking out security" or something like that.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DKU8EK5W0AA4dwH.jpg

rbinv3• 7 years ago

I honestly can't tell if this is real or not. If it is: what the fuck.

deogeo• 7 years ago

Surveillance for me, not for thee...

gadders• 7 years ago

Tangentially related, but the other day I was at Southwark tube when I slipped and fell over in some fluid that was one the floor. I wasn't harmed, and for a laugh I requested my video footage via GDPR so I could see myself go down like a sack of spuds.

It was quite a simple process - you fill in a form, and send it along with a full length photo of yourself and a rough time, and in a few weeks they send you a passworded DVD.

They also emailed me and told me that:

"In the letter I have confirmed that the cause of the spillage was as a result of a female who had exited a train prior to yours, becoming ill and vomiting on the floor, where you fell.

This was reported via a Passenger Help Point. In fact the customer and her male colleague remained in position directing people away from the vomit initially. They left the area shortly before the arrival of your train. "

:-(

rapnie4• 7 years ago

Some years ago I saw a documentary from a CCTV control room in Rotterdam, Netherlands monitoring busy shopping streets.

The operators deemed everyone walking aimlessly as suspicious, and would follow them from camera to camera. At one point a guy was reading from a piece of paper, and the camera zoomed in until the text was clearly readable. Creepy af.

The mentality there was, if you feel uncomfortable you probably have something to hide.

moksly• 7 years ago

That goes well with my social anxiety. :p

lm284692• 7 years ago

I very often go out at night to walk or take some picture of monuments in Berlin. I get stopped every single time by security guards, police, &c. "It's a private property you can't be there" Ah right, the sidewalk is a private property now. The worst thing is that you can't says anything, you can't call the cops on the cops...

Try taking a picture of police officers/cars or of a security camera. It's 100% legal but they'll act like it's not.

achow2• 7 years ago

From the people who are not familiar with studies conducted in the software usability labs, quite a common question is - Aren't test participant aware of the very visible camera pointed at them and the monitor and therefore they would not be at their natural self?

The answer is the test participants forget that there are cameras once they start on a task.

I guess same thing is true in our daily life, once we are focused on task at hand (grocery shopping, catching bus, or driving safe...) we would stop being aware of things which doesn't come in the way of that task.

rapnie4• 7 years ago

With AI/ML and facial recognition I wonder how long it will take before supermarkets etc. start to track the productivity of their employees and account them for it (reprimand, salary, job loss, ..).

They will be 100% aware of the cameras then, all-of-the-time.

isostatic• 7 years ago

One thing that really harms the utility of cameras is face coverings. Over the last 20 years the two most prolific face coverings in the UK have been attacked in society - Hoodies and Niquab/Burkas. For various reasons the UK populatino has been conditioned to see a face covering and think "Crime". The UK's equivalent of Trump has denigrate people wearing veils, the media has spent a decade attacking "hoodies" [1]

I'm sure it's a coincidence.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/boris-johnso... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hoodies-lout...

rkagerer2• 7 years ago

When I was young it was polite and proper etiquette to ask someone before taking their picture.

rapnie4• 7 years ago

StreetComplete - OpenStreetMap editor for Android - has an open quest issue for collecting surveillance camera properties.

https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete/issues/87

edit: the issue also contains a link to Where Are The Eyes, another camera registration app: https://eyes.daylightingsociety.org/

elygre2• 7 years ago

I remember this quote or saying:

“We live in a special time: there are cameras everywhere, and we can see them. In the past, they were not everywhere. In the future, we will not be able to see them.”

Merrill• 7 years ago

I wonder what the ratio of real versus dummy cameras is?

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Home-Security-Video-S...

ryandvm• 7 years ago

I wonder if you could fight fire with fire on this one. Imagine a grassroots project of targeted surveillance that specifically focused on geo-tracking the people that could change things (politicians, law enforcement) but ironically operated by privacy minded folks.

Basically, anyone with a fixed camera could participate. They'd have their video uploaded to a system that would use facial recognition on regional lawmakers to produce an incredibly creepy database of all the public activity of the targets. I would think this would be creepy enough to bring a national conversation about the topic front and center.

It's a bit of a false-flag/scorched-earth operation, but the end goal being legislation that makes such invasive surveillance illegal.

I documented every surveillance camera on my way to work in New York City

Related Stories