Playing the devil’s advocate here. Suppose in the perfect world we got to design ideal surveillance, how would it work?
You could track every person and item in public space and automatically fine a percentage of net income for violations. Think in terms of enhanced red light and speed cameras.
The system would store everything encrypted in a distributed system. Data would automatically get wiped out after 30 days. The public would be able to verify this (open source code and public access logs)
Any humans accessing the feeds would need a court order specifying time span + place + item being searched for and a good reason why. The court orders would be also be publicly accessible. May be a blockchain which is append only and distributed. Some form of hard mechanisms to prevent anyone being above the law. If anyone abuses access, they’d stand a trial too)
Access would would blur out all other faces other than person being investigated.
Basically what I’m saying is let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Good Surveillance may offer the means to quickly find violators and deter crime. A car got stolen. Boom, easily identified. A kid got lost/kidnapped. Instant search. Some asshole didn’t cleanup after their dog pooped. They think twice. Littering in public space. Nay nay.
Whether we like it or not, with the advance of cheap cameras, cheap processing power and advanced computer vision algorithms/neural nets. Surveillance is coming. It’s a god like power.
I believe we should at-least be having conversations on safe and trust worthy surveillance.
Facebook/Google already know what everyone is doing. We don’t know what they are doing with our data. The information asymmetry is a problem.