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Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

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Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#41

Post by chucksmash »

burnte wrote: post #30
omarhaneef wrote: post #5

My first thought was: how is NYC not on this list since it has cameras on every block, and has for decades. And then I saw this: "Atlanta was the only place in the U.S. to crack the top ten, with 15.56 cameras per thousand residents." So they are looking at cameras per 1000 residents. This seems like the wrong way to count. If you point a camera at a block, you see everyone on that block whether there is one person o…

I agree with your assessment. I'm in Atlanta and I'd be hard pressed to say I see too many cameras outside of roadway cameras, which we have LOTS of. I'd wager road cams make up a very health proportion of the cameras counted by this article. Pedestrian cameras, not so much.

Note the population figure for Atlanta though: 501,178. They're only counting cameras and people within the city limits, not the area that most people broadly call "Atlanta".

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#42

Post by Semaphor »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #19
omarhaneef wrote: post #5

My first thought was: how is NYC not on this list since it has cameras on every block, and has for decades. And then I saw this: "Atlanta was the only place in the U.S. to crack the top ten, with 15.56 cameras per thousand residents." So they are looking at cameras per 1000 residents. This seems like the wrong way to count. If you point a camera at a block, you see everyone on that block whether there is one person o…

Yeah, it also conflates private/publicly owned cameras. As someone who lives in London, I think we get unfairly portrayed as a surveillance state, because really the vast majority of cameras are inside shops and businesses, not on the street, and not connected to any central databank. I personally don't find cameras like these troubling. Once you get out of central London, most streets don't have cameras on them.

> I personally don't find cameras like these troubling.

It’s interesting to hear this difference. Here in Germany there are often cases where the courts forbid fake cameras because they "create an atmosphere of surveillance".

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#43

Post by _iyig »

omarhaneef wrote: post #5

My first thought was: how is NYC not on this list since it has cameras on every block, and has for decades. And then I saw this: "Atlanta was the only place in the U.S. to crack the top ten, with 15.56 cameras per thousand residents." So they are looking at cameras per 1000 residents. This seems like the wrong way to count. If you point a camera at a block, you see everyone on that block whether there is one person o…

As you suggest, NYC is intensively and effectively surveilled by the NYPD. The first bit of Steven Rambam’s talk at HOPE 2016 covers this in detail, starting around 3:30:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FHwl6AyL6js

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#44

Post by omarhaneef »

evandev wrote: post #36
omarhaneef wrote: post #5

My first thought was: how is NYC not on this list since it has cameras on every block, and has for decades. And then I saw this: "Atlanta was the only place in the U.S. to crack the top ten, with 15.56 cameras per thousand residents." So they are looking at cameras per 1000 residents. This seems like the wrong way to count. If you point a camera at a block, you see everyone on that block whether there is one person o…

Even when looking at raw camera numbers, Chicago has 35,000 vs NYC's 11,000 cameras.

Ah, interesting.

I suspect they mean the wider NYC area. Manhattan itself is just shy of 34 square miles, and I think it is probably more surveillance dense per square mile than any other place in the US, but that may not apply to the wider NYC area.

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#45

Post by testplzignore »

greggman2 wrote: post #32
AJRF wrote: post #9

Top 20 1. Chongqing, China – 2,579,890 cameras for 15,354,067 people = 168.03 cameras per 1,000 people 2. Shenzhen, China – 1,929,600 cameras for 12,128,721 people = 159.09 cameras per 1,000 people 3. Shanghai, China – 2,985,984 cameras for 26,317,104 people = 113.46 cameras per 1,000 people 4. Tianjin, China – 1,244,160 cameras for 13,396,402 people = 92.87 cameras per 1,000 people 5. Ji’nan, China – 540,463 cameras…

There's a lot of comparing apples to oranges 3. Shanghai, China – 2,985,984 cameras for 26,317,104 people = 113.46 cameras per 1,000 people 76. Tokyo, Japan - 24,500 cameras for 37,435,191 people = 0.65 cameras per 1,000 people Well, first off what are we comparing? They list 26.3 million people for Shanghai and 37.4 million for Tokyo. That's comparing the metropolitian area of Tokyo (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba)…

The original article - https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv... - explains the source of the data. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bKBFiVXNzrgtW95j66Tp... shows the source of the camera counts. The population counts came from http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/. Just the fact that the counts came from two different places make this data pretty dubious.

A better methodology would be to do a physical audit. Have some people in each city manually count the number of cameras over some area, then extrapolate from there. This has the flaw of missing hidden or inaccessible cameras, but at least would be consistent.

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#46

Post by newsreview1 »

The ACLU is currently fighing several battles to keep law enforcement from being able to access drivers license photos for facial recognition in crime related matters. Interesting read. https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/privacy-borders...

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#47

Post by lurker458 »

omarhaneef wrote: post #5

My first thought was: how is NYC not on this list since it has cameras on every block, and has for decades. And then I saw this: "Atlanta was the only place in the U.S. to crack the top ten, with 15.56 cameras per thousand residents." So they are looking at cameras per 1000 residents. This seems like the wrong way to count. If you point a camera at a block, you see everyone on that block whether there is one person o…

Even better would be the amount of seconds each person is surveilled during their time in public space. Summed as an absolute number, and as a ratio of the total time they spend in public space.

A camera in a busy street or at a chokepoint is worse (or more effective, depending on your viewpoint) than one in a cul-the-sac, even if they cover the same amount of space.

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#48

Post by jbattle »

mcbits wrote: post #39
gruez wrote: post #3

The headline is slightly misleading without context on how big the list is. Otherwise you could say >Every major American city make the list of most surveilled places in the world with a list size of 500. Anyways, the list seems the top offenders seems to be China (by far) and UK (to an extent). No surprise there. The list follows a power distribution, so the first few cities on the list are significantly worse than…

It's not clear why the number of cameras in a city would fit a power law, which usually arises from some kind of feedback effect. More cameras -> something -> more cameras. Any ideas for what "something" is? (Also... holy shit, that's a spammy site. Blocked.)

An idea: Cameras are deployed for a few different purposes. The more discrete functions you are trying to accomplish, the more cameras you need.

Example 1: Red light cameras. Only needed at specific intersections that have particular characteristics (high speed? high volume? not sure). The distribution of these probably maps more to physical space than population itself as the spacing of red lights is relatively independent of population.

Example 2: Cameras that are aimed at crime suppression. These will be unevenly distributed around a city depending on where crime happens. Looking at Chicago I see particular neighborhoods heavily blanketed in cameras, others very very sparsely. The distribution of this type of camera would be quite different than traffic-control cameras.

Example 3: Population monitoring cameras. I honestly don't know why China has so many cameras. Are these literally population surveillance cameras? These might be evenly distributed around a city to maximize coverage.

Some of the power law distribution you see might be a result of different cities applying cameras for 1, 2, 3, N different functions (each of which requires a different number of cameras).

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#49

Post by scarejunba »

sandworm101 wrote: post #28
theobon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not networked to the national police I expect that many commercial security cameras do have facial recognition to identify suspected thieves and VIPs along with tracking movement habits through the store which is shared with advertisers and product manufactures to justify cost for higher profile shelf space.

>> tracking movement habits through the store My understanding is that was a passing fad a few years ago. It was hyped by some startups but commercial users found it less than helpful compared to traditional metrics. I met a grocery store consultant (a real job) at a security conference. He said they used cameras to deal with traffic issues (even load between aisles) and predict cashier/customer ratios. They had aban…

They don't need CV for this. They can use beacons embedded in smart devices to tell which part of the building you're in. Worked with one of these guys.

Re: Six U.S. Cities Make the List of Most Surveilled Places in the World

#50

Post by Spooky23 »

omarhaneef wrote: post #5

My first thought was: how is NYC not on this list since it has cameras on every block, and has for decades. And then I saw this: "Atlanta was the only place in the U.S. to crack the top ten, with 15.56 cameras per thousand residents." So they are looking at cameras per 1000 residents. This seems like the wrong way to count. If you point a camera at a block, you see everyone on that block whether there is one person o…

Seriously, this is dumb. NYC alone gets 60M visitors.

NYPD has a well integrated and pervasive intelligence system. I’m sure Atlanta is no slouch, but the money spent by NYC just dwarfs anyone who isn’t the Feds.

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