Loss of Privacy

The Oxford City Council has proposed that CCTV be mandatory for all taxis and that every conversion be recorded. This is, presumably, for everyone’s safety.

Such a blanket scheme would seem to breach the Information Commissioner’s code of practice on the issue. It says recording conversations is unlikely to be justified and that sound on CCTV should usually be turned off. It refers to recording in a cab occurring only if a panic button is pressed.

Yet Oxford City Council does not believe it is flouting this code, saying the risk of intrusion is acceptable compared to public safety.

Recording conversations would be justified if assaults, sex attacks or fraud was constantly being committed in our taxis.

The council would like all taxis to be fitted with CCTV by April 2015.

The necessary equipment must be installed by taxi drivers licensed for the first time by 6 April 2012. A panic button must also be fitted.

Cabs already registered will have until April 2015 to get the kit fitted, the council said.

The council said the cameras would run continuously, but only view footage relating to police matters would be reviewed.

Big Brother Watch said it was “a total disregard for civil liberties”.

She said police would only locate footage, stored on a CCTV hard drive for 28 days, if it was needed for a police investigation.

She added: “The risk of intrusion into private conversations has to be balanced against the interests of public safety, both of passengers and drivers.”

While this is presented as a means to provide public safety, the rules are too vague at this point. We do not know when the cameras will be turned on and off, who will be in charge of the storage or who will take complaints from customers. This is before anyone looks at the civil liberties issues concerning CCTV in taxis. There are far too many questions that need to be answered before a scheme such as this is even implemented. Until all concerns are addressed, it’d be best to just sit and say nothing in a taxi, lest any conversation be misinterpreted or used against you later.

In Farmington Hills, Michigan intelligent lights will soon be keeping a watchful eye over its citizens. But is it really for entertainment and safety or a gross invasion of privacy?

“In each lighting fixture or each lighting pole, there is processor very much like an iPhone. And it takes inputs and outputs and talks back and forth. And the poles actually talk to each other,” said Ron Harwood.

When you step come into view of the street light, there is a camera that spots you, and the person on the other side sees you by white specs on a black screen. The camera senses that somebody is there, and if wants, it can even take your picture.

The system is also capable of recording conversations making critics cry invasion of privacy.

“This is not a system with spook technology. It’s much more transparent. It can just talk to you and say, don’t fall over Niagara Falls,” said Harwood.

It may be able to just make a stupid joke about Niagara Falls, but the fact that it can spot you, track you, and record your conversations is, indeed, spook technology. It’s worrisome that people are simply accepting a program such as this as the normal course of events. If no one in Farmington Hills fights against it, it will start showing up elsewhere in the United States.

Starting next month, an Australian shopping center will begin tracking customers in their malls, a move that has prompted privacy concerns and an investigation.

One unnamed Queensland shopping centre is next month due to become the first in the nation to fit receivers that detect unique mobile phone radio frequency codes to pinpoint location within two metres.

Path Intelligence national sales manager Kerry Baddeley stressed that no mobile phone user names or numbers could be accessed.

“All we do is log the movement of a phone around an area and aggregate this to provide trend data for businesses,” she said.

“It’s much less intrusive or invasive than existing people-counting methods, for instance CCTV cameras and number plate monitoring.”

Except for the fact that, when you are shopping in a mall, no one is checking your number plate inside the store. While number plate monitoring has its own problems, it is generally accessing that data to look for crimes. CCTV is also not able to clearly identify a person and there are means to hide your identity from the camera. It is also, typically, passively monitoring a person’s movement and, theoretically, only tracking you when you have done something suspicious.

Australian Privacy Foundation chairman Dr Roger Clarke said emerging retail tracking techniques were “seriously creepy” and should be thoroughly investigated.

Some shops are already using image-monitoring to log customers’ movements, how long they stop in front of products, and whether they are male or female.

Federal Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said the Privacy Act applied only if the information collected identified individuals.

Ms Baddeley said mobile phone monitoring, already operating in the UK and US, would help the struggling retail sector develop marketing campaigns and identify the best mix of shops in centres.

Just because others are doing it, doesn’t make it right. A person who has a cell phone has no ability to opt out of said tracking while shopping. The only thing a person can do is not shop there or leave their cell phone at home so that they are not tracked.

She said receivers attached to walls picked up phone transmissions. Data was then fed via the internet to computer servers to create weekly reports outlining popular customer routes and visitors’ length of stay.

And while they claim that they cannot track or identify a person, if that person shops in the mall, or several malls, their unique ID on their cell phone will, indeed, identify exactly who they are.

Questions remain about the legality of such a system. Australia’s Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 states that

A person shall not:
(a) intercept;
(b) authorize, suffer or permit another person to intercept; or
(c) do any act or thing that will enable him or her or another person to intercept;
a communication passing over a telecommunications system.

Furthermore, communication is defined as:

“communication” includes conversation and a message, and any part of a conversation or message, whether:

(a) in the form of: (i) speech, music or other sounds;(ii) data;(iii) text;(iv) visual images, whether or not animated; or (v) signals; or (b) in any other form or in any combination of forms.

The signal is intercepted because the device being used here has to gather/intercept the signal. As defined in Australian law, the device that is to be used in malls is intercepting signals that are sent over a telecommunications system, which is illegal. However, it appears that there is a bypass to this law because they are only using radio communications.

Considering the fact that malls also have CCTV, it wouldn’t take much to track and identify a person shopping. The best advice is, stop visiting malls and, if you must shop at a mall, pay with cash and leave your cell phone home or take out the battery before you get anywhere near the mall as they can track you outside in the parking lot too.

The city of Atlanta, Georgia is home to the Video Integration Center, allowing city police to monitor over a hundred public and private CCTV cameras. This isn’t enough, however, for the police. They want more monitoring.

Talks are underway to link up with more cameras at CNN Center, Georgia State University, the Georgia World Congress Center and MARTA, along with cameras in Buckhead.

Officials say hundreds or thousands more private-sector cameras will eventually feed into the center.

“This is just the beginning,” said Dave Wilkinson, president of the Atlanta Police Foundation, which helped raise money for the center. “This is going to grow by leaps and bounds over the years. The goal, of course, is to have the entire city blanketed.”

Officials insist cameras linked to the center will only watch areas the public could already see. The city’s law department is drafting rules for the center, Ferguson said.

Unfortunately, officials are not talking to each other as you cannot blanket a city yet only have cameras where the public can already see. The two statements are incompatible. Yet, city officials are okay with tracking innocent people as they go about their daily lives.

“I should hope the public is not okay with it,” said Brett Bittner, executive director of the Libertarian Party of Georgia. “We’re talking about filming every aspect of people’s lives once they step out of the house.”

This is never acceptable and it doesn’t help fight crime. One only need to look at the massive test case of the United Kingdom where people are already on camera once they leave their homes. Crime hasn’t dropped there as a result of intruding cameras at all.