They’re Watching You!

Britain is said to have the most closely watched nation in the world when it comes to closed-circuit television systems.

In 2013, it was estimated that four to six million CCTV cameras were filming the nation, and in London, the public can expect to be caught up to 300 times a day on camera.

We are being told that this is for our own protection, that it’s used to keep watch on possible terrorist activity, and for public criminality too, as footage is frequently used as evidence in court, but questions need to be answered about this technology and who controls the captured data.

I believe people should be concerned. There’s definitely a lot of monitoring going on.

Surveillance technology hit the headlines when it was revealed that a security firm in a development in London’s Kings Cross was using facial recognition technology (FRT) on CCTV camera footage of the public.

The cameras, said the security firm Argent, use a number of detection and tracking techniques, including facial recognition, but also have sophisticated systems in place to safeguard the privacy of the general public. This is a serious and widespread concern over the legality of these programs and what is done with the data gathered.

It’s now been said that this technology is potentially going to be used by the Barbican Centre and in a central London shopping district, too.

Our right to privacy is violated by the intrusive nature of facial recognition technologies. It has the potential to drastically change our public areas by requiring us to keep an eye on who we are with and where we go, therefore threatening our right to free speech.

Facial recognition represents an inherent threat to our rights and has no business on our streets.

Digital manipulation and deepfakes, which include editing photos and videos to depict something that never happened, are now another problem. Now the camera can deceive us, and we have seen the technology is there to manipulate, as with Nancy Pelosi’s doctored speech that was tweeted by Donald Trump, so could it be used on CCTV footage as well?

There is undoubtedly the technology to accomplish this, and as artificial intelligence advances, it will get easier and easier. It might become a problem in a short period of time, in my opinion.

As we know, with social media, technology advances faster than laws or regulations, and perhaps we are right to be paranoid about what the lenses trained on our civil liberties actually mean. Unlike social media, however, there’s no way of switching them off.

Hardly a week goes by without a new warning about the possible horrors of facial recognition, deep fakes or fake news.

It’s often said that the camera never lies, but that’s not true – anything can be faked, and now we have the continued growth of the use of video surveillance systems across public and private sectors, and it’s now becoming acceptable in society.

We now see smart doorbells, wireless cameras and closed-circuit television (CCTV), which now continues to evolve into more complex artificial intelligence (AI) which collects our data.

How the technology is used also continues to evolve. This includes connected databases utilising Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) or the use of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) in public spaces.

They frequently process a lot of people’s personal information for security, crime prevention, or other specific uses like digital advertising. Some of these applications, nevertheless, may be quite invasive, particularly if processing occurs without the subject’s awareness.

We are one step closer to 1984, or maybe we are past that. Joseph Stalin would have been impressed.

They know where your car is at any given moment; now they want to know where you are and what you’re doing. Some will say that if you’re not doing anything wrong, what’s the problem? But in a state where you get banged up for a tweet, who knows what is right or wrong these days?

If you didn’t see this coming, then you weren’t paying attention!

This is why our government are importing criminals by the thousands because once insecurity and violence reach critical mass, they will impose these draconian measures they planned all along.

People demonstrated this during the pandemic, and they were ready to give their freedom for safety, and it will happen again.

And those saying it’s okay because they won’t break the law, forget how easy it is for our government to enforce unjust laws, and just because it’s the law does not make it right.

What are you going to do when you can’t leave your house without leave? Or travel more than 10 miles from your address? Or use your car. Eat that steak you really fancy, buy whatever you want, withdraw more than £100, watch that video because it uses too much electricity. I could go on!