Legislature Building? Around Courthouses? Banks? Public Transit? Schools? Traffic? On the Streets? Should they exist in all of these places, only some of them, or none at all? What’s your opinion?
(Btw: I remember my highschool had them, felt kinda creepy since I distrust the school admin, like… even the other places with cameras didn’t feel as weird)
I’m a privacy advocate, but I do not believe that the cameras themselves are the main threat to privacy, and do not necessarily have a problem with cameras placed in any of the locations you listed, given the following conditions:
The camera system is closed circuit with the footage stored securely on a device on the premises, not connected to or stored on the internet, not combined and analyzed automatically/algorithmically with other footage and data, and the footage is deleted or overwritten after a reasonable period of time.
I believe the main threats to privacy involve how the footage is stored and analyzed.
Seconded. A lot of harms we see from surveillance cameras (and all kinds of other tech) come from how and to whom the data is made accessible to, rather than the cameras themselves.
It’s fine if my neighbor has a doorbell with a camera on it so they can see when a package is delivered, when their kid comes home, or have video of something happening on the sidewalk that could possibly be needed as evidence in a court case, where they can manually export a video and give it to whoever would require it. But it’s not fine if that video is being always uploaded to a corporation’s servers, and they’re handing it off to the police, for example.
Surprisingly, Ring actually stopped doing this given enough backlash, but the risk still remains of future changes to that policy, any breach or software vulnerability, etc.
Ring has said they’re going to start doing it again. They stopped until people cared about something else and now that people are distracted they’re gonna start doing it again.