
The Dawn of Robot Surveillance - oil25
https://www.aclu.org/report/dawn-robot-surveillance
======
Animats
It's already here, and it's called Amazon Ring.[1] "Our township is now
entirely covered by cameras," said Captain Vincent Kerney, detective bureau
commander of the Bloomfield Police Department. "Every area of town we have,
there are some Ring cameras."

Amazon seems to be handling consumer surveillance, while Microsoft is
concentrating on the business market. Google Nest, of course, watches you
while you sleep. Facebook is a bit late to the party; their "Portal" device is
still in pre-order.

 _" Big Brother is watching YOU!"_

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/features/amazons-helping-police-
build-a...](https://www.cnet.com/features/amazons-helping-police-build-a-
surveillance-network-with-ring-doorbells/)

------
EGreg
Better article:

[https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-
te...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-
technologies/army-robot-surveillance-guards-coming)

I have long warned about this. Usually when you leave a parking lot and go to
a store, you think you can come out later and not go to your car, achieving
free parking for a while! Now with the AI behind surveillance you may no
longer be able to. Gait recognition, facial and clothing and so on. Maybe it
would still be easy to fool for a while by changing up those things on the way
out. But you’d have to go back to the store before going to your car.

------
john-state-moz
Perfect surveillance will be a hurdle society must cross, but we can come out
of it to a more honest place.

Many injustices exist because groups of people can hide behind hypocrisy;
pretending to be different from those they target, while engaging in the same
behavior themselves. When there is nowhere to hide, there is nowhere to shut
out the reality that we're all just advanced animals doing the best we can.

Unfortunately, as u/devoply mentioned, there will be significant pain (and
yes, bloodshed) in this process as the legal system's many flaws will be writ
large.

In the best scenario we'll eventually use systems like this to form more
realistic and flexible societies, rather than as tools to enforce rigid ideas.

The hard part will be that as these surveillance networks develop, they won't
be perfect. Their creators, elites, etc. will be able to use surveillance for
thee and not for me. That, IMO is the thing to watch out for. If average
citizens are going to be watched, everyone must be watched.

Edit to clarify my use of "elites": I use it here to mean anyone with enough
money, power or influence to shield themselves from surveillance.

~~~
pessimizer
Surveillance will be owned by the people who own the surveillance, not
socialized under any circumstances that I could imagine. Maybe a total
transparency religious cult arises and takes over the world within a decade?

So "we" won't be doing anything. Right now is the perfect time for a your
market in individual surveillance, the tech and software to run it is cheap
and available, but just as capital under a free market accrues to a very few
at the top, the majority of personal surveillance equipment involves sending
everything to google and amazon. I could more easily see a future where
individual surveillance is deemed dangerous and potential child pornography,
and all cameras are required to have their input sent to government-certified
organizations like google, and amazon. (aside: in that future, firefox will
also be certified, have one percent of the market, be entirely contained on
one floor of one building on a google campus, and subcontract analysis to a
3rd party company started by google alums with ex-CIA on the board of
directors.)

There is no possible future in which you will have access to any unfiltered
surveillance, unless you are currently an oligarch or associate with
oligarchs.

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maxxxxx
I find this pretty scary. In all dictatorships of the past and present there
were ways for people to do things the dictatorships didn’t know. They could
meet and communicate with each other. Soon it may be possible to know where
any person is at any moment and run analytics that monitors connections
between people in real time. In the past they could only monitor a very
limited group of people because it was expensive. Add to that robot cops that
can act on this immediately then maybe the next Nazis, Stalin or North Korea
can maintain their power by sheer force for a very long time. Maybe people
will find ways around that as they often have done In the past but maybe not.
Definitely very scary.

~~~
devoply
Our legal systems in all our countries are totalitarian like literally. The
reason that very few people come in contact with them is libertarian
philosophy. In that if nobody witnesses something happen or is not bothered by
it then nobody gets in trouble. When you add continuous surveillance to
everything then many more people that otherwise would've gone unnoticed will
come in contact with the legal system and be effected by it.

~~~
fwsgonzo
Not to mention that anyone is guilty of plenty of crimes at any point in time.
You just have to decide to "get" someone, and they will be taken away.

[https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/12/forty-five-
th...](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/12/forty-five-things-i-
learned-in-the-gulag/)

Just read number 37 if you're having problems accepting that the law will be
applied unevenly.

------
throwaway434590
I've recently started seeing a ton of these kinds of cameras with video
analytics being deployed in South Africa. The company that is mostly rolling
them out, vumacam [1], strikes me as quite scary.

Because they’re not a government organisation and their business model seems
to be selling their camera feeds to private security companies, I wanted to
find out specifically who they share video feeds with but they're not totally
clear about this besides for saying that they share information with third
parties. Does this mean that anyone can claim to be a security company, pay
for the feed and get access to video analytics and cameras at every street
corner? Even if this is not true, it still looks as if there might be many
opportunities for people to abuse the video feed _just_ when legitimate
security companies have access.

What really worries me though, is whether or not they're running facial
recognition on the camera feeds. On their website, they're very open about
running automated licences plate recognition and market it as a huge selling
point. But in their privacy policy documents they often make reference to
collecting data about individuals and vehicles as well as "biometric
information" [2]. Plus, if you look under the features section of their
website they show screenshots from something called "Milestone" which seems to
be the platform they use for video analytics [3] and it seems like there are
tons [4] of facial tracking plugins that work on this system. So, it could be
totally possible for someone to install face tracking in addition to license
plate recognition, whenever they wanted.

When I talk to people about the cameras most are so excited about the prospect
of them reducing crime that they would happily accept any of the possible
effects they might have on their privacy. Which is fair enough, crime is such
a huge problem in South Africa that it might be worth taking a hit to our
privacy if it means less people get murdered. I think what this means is that
in places with high crime rates, it’s going to be very hard to convince people
to take their privacy over anything that might tangibly curb crime. For
myself, I can’t help but see these cameras as leading to dystopian like
futures, which makes me very worried, even if they were to significantly
reduce crime.

[1] [https://www.vumacam.co.za/](https://www.vumacam.co.za/) [2]
[https://www.vumacam.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/PAIA-
Ma...](https://www.vumacam.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/PAIA-Manual-
Vumacam-25.10.2018.pdf) [3]
[https://www.milestonesys.com/](https://www.milestonesys.com/) [4]
[https://www.milestonesys.com/solution-finder/ayonix/APS-
mile...](https://www.milestonesys.com/solution-finder/ayonix/APS-milestone-
face-recognition-plugin/)

