They are literally everywhere. I can’t go any place without being watched. I just want some privacy. The most alarming part is that they put cameras on all entrances and exits so they can know who’s entering or leaving. Why do they need to stalk me as I go about my day? The area I live in is overall pretty safe so I don’t see the justification.
I have also noticed that some people actually feel safe where there are cameras. I get that people can get scared but I don’t think creating a giant network of mass surveillance is the answer.
What is this dystopian future we have marched into.
I adamantly maintain that the US needs an entire movement to enshrine the right to privacy to its citizens in the constitution.
Including medical privacy. The forced birthers can fuck right off about knowing my wife’s menstrual cycle.
I’ve been wondering how far I could get making a pitch for religious freedom from advertising. Should possibly think about it as religious freedom from tracking in general.
I’m guessing it’s like this everywhere, but in my country, public cameras also have microphones. I feel like we don’t think about that a lot.
i dont know about your country, but in germany its regulated and in public places the footage is only allowed to be stored up to 72 hours
I was literally in a CAVE the other day and I looked up and saw “under video surveillance”. You can’t even escape it 100 meters under the earth.
Yes it was a privately owned attraction. That’s not an excuse.
Weird, almost counterintuitive, example. But I get your thought.
A normally inaccessible and poorly lit tourist attraction, like a cave, is a good fit for surveillance for those times when a tourist wanders off or goes against the rules which could be harmful to themselves and others around them.
Having said that, I agree with your thought and that there are a lot of other areas that would be better without surveillance.
Then you really don’t want to know about mesh license plate readers.
They allow 24/7 monitoring of all drivers any where in a city … in real time
They’re horrific and apparently invisible to people. Any time I point them out I’ve been called crazy and told I was overreacting. Until driving around Illinois with a coworker when he started to understand the scale of it all. The more I see the more dizzying it becomes. There needs to be regulation for them
Please tell me more about these. A quick search yields individual cameras, but I don’t see exactly what you’re mentioning.
I saw an article about Chinese EVs being equipped with overly-powerful LiDAR for self driving or something, which meant that in essence, they drive about the places burning out camera sensors. This got me thinking - The human eye takes a lot more energy to damage it than the average ccd chip, and a small cheap laser pointer is way more than enough to wreck one. Would it be possible to get a LiDAR unit and pop it on a remote control car or a drone or something?
There’s a group in London that call themselves the Bladerunners who go around wrecking the ULEZ cameras, they use a few interesting methods, but they’re all a bit too direct, such as sawzalling camera poles down. The LiDAR looks like a better option.
I’d be worried about long term damage to humans. There also is the tinsey tiny issue of it being highly illegal.
The best think I can think of is pointing cameras out to everyone and making a fuss over it.
I want to punch people in the throat who say “YOU HAVE NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY IN A PUBLIC PLACE” because like, yeah, I know, I’d fucking like to though.
In that case why can’t I photograph the cameras? They are in the public after all.
Who has told you that you can’t photograph the cameras?
I feel the same,
to battle it I drive with my sun visors down,
all the time, even when it’s dark.I never voted for these camera’s,
and driving with them down is not illegal,
but they successfully block the sight of most camera’s.Brilliant idea. I’m gonna try that.
Honestly I don’t mind the street cameras as much. Where I am they are less common and only really seen in busy intersections. What bothers me is when everyone and there dog puts up cameras. You see them everywhere from coffeeshops to libraries. You want to stay in a hotel? Cameras everywhere.
Even worse imho is that many private residences now have cameras that record the whole street and other homes. No, they aren’t technically allowed to, but they all do. I have a neighbor across from me who just put up a ring doorbell that fully monitors my entire property (small town lot directly across). They now essentially create records of every time I come and go from my own house. And Amazon, and likely whomever else wants it, has full access to that information.
Not cool. These should be flat out banned. I don’t care if you want to have an overhead camera pointed only on your property, but that’s not what these things do at all.
Are you sure?
I also have a Ring doorbell camera so I know when someone is at the door.
- records on motion, not always
- motion detection has limited range, and Ring has options to tune it to your property line
- wide angle lens gets really poor with distance.
I live in a neighborhood where everything is close together so I tested this out. The camera can see there is a person walking on the other side of the street but not well enough to know who it is, plus it won’t be recorded since that is outside motion detection range
It will record you detectably on my side of the street but I have that mostly configured out. In general it’s not recording you unless you’re on my property l and even if it recorded more, pictures from any distance are extremely poor
Ya, my ring barely recorded cars driving by until I shortened the range. Also, imagine all the alerts if it was recording things 100ft away. Your phone would never stop buzzing.
You could ask your neighbor to take it down. I don’t think that’s a crazy request if the camera makes you want to close all your blinds.
I started wearing a N95 for medical reasons a few years ago and this may help with the cameras.
I’ve never done a selfie or posted any photos of my face on social media. I have a driver’s license but my country has privacy laws so that information shouldn’t be available to any company that wants it. On the other hand, The War Amps has access so maybe stores do as well.
I feel naked without a ballcap. A few stores in my area have the cameras at eye-level. I look down when entering or exiting if I’m not wearing sunglasses.
I never use the self checkouts. These often have high def cameras inches from one’s face. This is an effective way to connect a customer’s face and their name by way of a credit or bank card.
I always use cash.
I feel like you’re slipping too much into the paranoia region. Also masks don’t help with face recognition that much
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Yeah, I know you know better than everyone else, and everyone who disagrees is just an uneducated pleb, but this one you can test for yourself. More than half of the nodal points needed for the face recognition are above the centroid of the face, which usually a top point of a mask, and half of the other half are the outer part of the face which mask doesn’t conceal much. You need less then a half of the points to reliably recognize a face, and even me, stupid rube with no education, can do the math here.
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BTW I didn’t read
Oh that I can believe
Well, people tend to like to know who is entering their private property.
Or are there cameras watching who is entering your public parks and shit? I have cameras on my house, so people don’t need to enter if it makes them uncomfortable, but it’s handy for when people try to snoop when I am not around. Neighbours have stolen things in the past, even though it’s a tight knit community.
Have also provided the footage to police to prove that said neighbor who stole stuff assaulted another neighbor in the street since the camera covers the driveway.
It only takes one asshole to justify cameras.
I don’t have a problem with them putting a few cameras here and there. However, putting them everywhere is a bit crazy. Sure you can put a camera on a cash register or in key places in a parking garage but do you really need cameras on every area?
Have also provided the footage to police to prove that said neighbor who stole stuff assaulted another neighbor in the street since the camera covers the driveway.
The problem is: the very next step is “why don’t you just provide a live feed of your cameras to the police?” Maybe we can start with just part of the time, like when you’re on vacation. Hey, we’ll give you a great deal on your insurance… for the first year.
Residential cameras connected to the internet is the biggest issue for me. I wouldn’t mind most residential cameras if the video footage was only stored locally.
Yeah this is an important consideration and I hope to move to that, however it’s a bigger project than I have time for.
I have a Ring so the recordings are online and it’s certainly convenient. The basic plan keeps recording up to 180 days but of course once they have them it’s outside our control. It’s a good point that the length of time they’re kept doesn’t seem configurable. I would certainly prefer they be kept a much shorter time but don’t see a way to configure that
The one time a policeman came around to ask if my camera caught something, they asked me to check on my app and they took my word for it. While I understand they can compel Ring (or me) to give it up, maybe there’s some comfort that’s it’s not a dally worth their effort
EDIT While the plan says it keeps recordings up to 180 days, the default is 60 days for video and one week if you take snapshots. I did figure out how to set this this shorter but you can assume most people won’t
my mother has installed cameras in every room of her house except the bathroom. and external cameras. they are also internet connected. I tried to explain to her how these things are not secure and can easily be tapped into but she wouldn’t hear it
Did you encourage her to put them in the bathroom and to install quality microphones everywhere?
I encourage everyone to carry around an internet-connected audio-video listening device on their person at all times. Not only to have calls potentially tapped but also a microphone that can listen at any time and a non-removable battery.
Those are called smart glasses and its the next big thing.
I was thinking the smartphone that I’m typing this from…
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I have had them in airbnbs i was renting!
Current landlord has one just outside my apartment and it records audio. Fucking creepy
The Airbnb one is definitely illegal in the US.
I wonder if there is some sort of malicious compliance you could do with cameras. Maybe find a way to trigger the detection alarm without actually breaking any rules.
If it helps quell any anxiety, the ring cameras are not made of quality components. A neighbor with a south facing camera said that the camera was there when they moved in, but the lens is so sun damaged that you can’t see anything. It was installed maybe 2 years ago. They said that they only use it as a doorbell now.
As mentioned in another post, a malicious neighbor could blast UV light at the cameras day and night for a while to make the camera mostly ineffectve.
they could also take a hammer to it. Don’t see the point here
Some random creep put up a ring camera pointed directly at the bus stop near my house. It’s technically on their property but it’s pointed right at the bus stop it’s creepy as hell. Why can’t they just monitor their own door instead
At this point nothing u can do but give up. We really should make an open source decentralised tracking system and track and dox literally everyone on the planet. A billion Penopticons in better than one. Let everyone track everyone.
What we’re missing is some sort of ai to do global image recognition and tracking for any Person of Interest. So let’s not invest in ai?
No lets build exactly that make it opensource cause mass outcry/suffering. This would theoreticly lead to demand to implement safeguards against such abuses.
