This gets us to the central problem of today’s surveillance state. No one running the cameras wants to be observed. One reason that city officials object to releasing Flock data, for example, must that they themselves are among the recorded. The cameras are on them too; they too can be tracked. Everything means everything for these everywhere cameras.
Not having a right to privacy doesn’t mean we should record everyone’s every move if they aren’t locked in their windowless basement. Which they would have to be since its legally OK to have cameras pointing at your neighbors bedroom window or backyard, or to fly a recording drone over their house.
Additionally I think we should have a right to privacy in public. Why does your right to have your own surveillance fiefdom in your building extend to the street where I’m just trying to go for a jog? It interferes with my peace of mind, and it makes neighbors appear more like police than people I should be able to rely on.
I’m also exceptionally skeptical cameras have any impact on crime. I know police rarely investigate or solve property crime, and unless they prevent the crime from happening outright (doubt), or the camera owner has a full time live human monitoring to respond to an immediate action (businesses), it serves no purpose but to give the owner a false sense of security and to peep on your neighbors.
Getting broken into can be a very traumatic and violating experience, and in a better world we would try to help both the person who is driven to robbery and the person who’s space was violated. In the one we live in, people slap cameras and floodlights everywhere, mental health care is nonexistent, and we punish such that the cycle of poverty and crime continues. Thus nothing is solved and the world gets worse.
Police cameras and municipal cameras are even worse in these ways, now it isn’t the guy next door, its the state and all the money and power it holds doing a peep into your bedroom and a follow down the street. They don’t trust you, they don’t want you here, and you had better watch yourself. That message isn’t for everyone of course, but if you’re already marginalized in a community, it sure reads like the message is for you.
If we do install cameras, like red light cameras or speed cameras which have proven to do something, we need to be extraordinarily careful about where we place them and how we use them. And they should only be there until the underlying problem is solved, not placed as a solution themselves.
This is why I am conflicted. I don’t know where the line should be. I don’t know if anyone does. But like many things in life it is a balancing act with pro’s and con’s on either side.
I know very well that cameras offent don’t do much if anything. The place I work has had cars broken into the cop’s looked at the video of it happening and them going yup it happened don’t know who it is so can’t really do shit.
I mainly look at my cameras as a notification system. Like I said I know what’s happening on my property as it happens rather than after the fact. I also practice the 2nd amendment, now. ( a liberal with a gun what will happen next)
I’m guessing your in the US but if not ignore. The first amendment gives the right to record in public for news, everyone has the right to record and disseminate that info for the public. Would it be any different than someone with a photographic memory writing or drawing everything and disseminating that info to the public as news? The 4th amendment gives the right to be secured in your persons and things but if display it for me to see its not my duty to turn away, its yours to hide it. If you willing give the cops your info its your falt not theirs for violation of your 4th amendment right.
While uncomfortable, annoying and leads to people living in the basement with tinfoil over their windows, I would rather have the right to stand outside ice facilities, court houses, and public official houses on a public sidewalk, with a camera, protesting. Than deny any citizens a camera because someone was uncomfortable they where being filmed. Privacy in public isn’t a right but filming in public is. ( so we can hold our government accountable for the things they do.)
Edit. I trust random Joe Blow with a camera more than any state.
Everything you said except for the last paragraph. We did fine for close to a century without traffic cams when it was up to a cop to catch a violator in the act. now it’s surveillance cameras and A.I. that’s automated the task and I consider akin to the police cheating at their jobs, yet somehow we still justify their ever-increasing budgets. -How does that not end up as a totalitarian police-state?