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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

#51

Post by Bartweiss »

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 saw a "best cities for public transit" list recently that had Reno, NV up near the top. Which was obviously baffling, and sent me to find out why. I eventually found that one of the major factors was "miles of transit line per capita and another was something like "annual mileage per transit vehicle" (possibly per-capita?).

The goal was to evaluate density of coverage and frequency of arrivals. But that completely neglected population density, so it ended up rewarding cities for urban sprawl.

This feels like the same type of mistake, where per-capita count neglects both population density and total coverage. There's a massive difference between every shop having its own camera (even if police access them) and something like London's Ring of Steel, where the camera layout and even streets have been designed to maximize coverage and identification rate in the most populous areas.

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

#53

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

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…

Good point, I think it's even more complicated though.

Consider not only how many cameras there are and where, but also to what level of detail they are able to see, who has access to what they see, and as mentioned elsewhere ITT, the other systems that they are connected to.

e.g. a grainy CCTV cam in a convenience store is a single camera, as is one in a Gorgon Stare surveillance plane, but those do not generate equivalent amounts of surveillance.

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

#54

Post by Bartweiss »

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.

This is a tricky problem, but I don't think limiting the numbers to public cameras would work. I'm not sure any numerical approach would.

In Atlanta, for instance, the cameras surveilled by the police are 90% privately owned. And this isn't just "with a warrant" or "when a shopkeeper reports a crime and provides tapes", but nonstop, integrated access to their feeds.

Conversely, a lot of the cameras in London may be private, unconnected, and indoors, which I agree is much less worrying. But the Ring of Steel does far more surveillance per-camera-per-capita than any shop camera, since it has unified design meant to maximize how many people are identifiably captured on camera.

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

#56

Post by olivermarks »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #34
olivermarks wrote: post #27

'Surveilled' by who is the bigger question, and what public access and rights do we have around the data produced, and is it being fed to some sort of Stasi style panopticon? It's remarkable to me the lack of public surveillance video produced after major events - the Epstein NY 'suicide' is the latest example, the 2017 UK London Bridge event another. (The latter had video from a mile away filmed with 90's technology…

There are plenty of surveillance (and other) videos of the London Bridge attack. The question is rather why would they publicise videos of people being stabbed to death or run over in HD gory details?

who is 'they'? There are vey few surveillance videos of that incident publicly available. I was thinking of this one when I wrote the above https://youtu.be/BR1s7az-f-k

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

#57

Post by andreilys »

landcoctos wrote: post #31
Bostonian wrote: post #12

If the surveillance leads to the prompt arrest of violent criminals, it may be a good thing. I expect privacy in my home, not while on the sidewalk.

What if cameras follow you on every trip you make to/from your home. Are you ok with a blotter on all your movements?

Related: Surveillance Camera Man on Youtube who films people without their permission in public -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg&t=

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

#58

Post by dsfyu404ed »

scarejunba wrote: post #49
sandworm101 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

They need cameras for theft. Tossing a person detecting algorithm on top is basically free (especially if you don't need it to do fancy things like track faces).

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

#60

Post by cameronbrown »

testplzignore wrote: post #45
greggman2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> Have some people in each city manually count the number of cameras over some area, then extrapolate from there.

This assumes a uniform distribution where one isn't obvious. Some places are bound to have more security than others.

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