jimnyc
06-08-2021, 03:39 PM
A tiny China. And Los Angeles has over 35,000 cameras.
It'll be a great tool when it works to identify and locate a terrorist, but problematic as I see easy abuse.
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New Yorkers Are Watched by More Than 15,000 Surveillance Cameras
People have only official assurances that the technology isn’t being used to invade their privacy.
Even as debates continue about pervasive government monitoring of our lives, surveillance technology is becoming more sophisticated and pervasive. New York City residents in just three boroughs live and work under the watchful gaze of over 15,000 cameras. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to run the images they capture through software that matches faces to identities—though not always reliably. The result is not just a loss of privacy for those under constant scrutiny, but also the potential for confrontations with law enforcement.
"The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to track people in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx by running images from 15,280 surveillance cameras into invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software," according to Amnesty International. "Thousands of volunteers from around the world participated in the investigation, tagging 15,280 surveillance cameras at intersections across Manhattan (3,590), Brooklyn (8,220) and the Bronx (3,470)."
The volunteers continue to count cameras in Queens and Staten Island to get a fuller picture of the extent of surveillance in the city. The NYPD is open about using facial recognition but claims that "[v]ideo from city-owned and private cameras is not analyzed unless it is relevant to a crime that has been committed."
Last summer, police laid siege to the apartment of Black Lives Matter activist Derrick Ingram after he allegedly yelled in an officer's ear through a megaphone during a demonstration. Police identified him through facial recognition technology that compared his image at the protest against photos on his Instagram account.
The use of images scraped from social media to populate databases for identification purposes is a hallmark of Clearview AI, a major provider of the technology. The tactic has enabled the company to accumulate billions of images while, as of early 2020, the FBI's own database contained 640 million. Clearview AI faces a lawsuit in California over its scraping practices and withdrew from Canada after being slapped with an investigation by that country's privacy commissioner.
While the sheer number of cameras monitoring New York City residents is high, the NYPD is hardly the only law-enforcement agency to attempt to implement a surveillance state. In April, Buzzfeed News acquired a listing of 1,803 publicly funded agencies that have used or are using Clearview's facial recognition tools. The listing likely understated the number of agencies making use of the technology, since many departments gain access to pooled resources through federally funded Regional Information Sharing Systems Centers.
Rest - https://reason.com/2021/06/07/new-yorkers-are-watched-by-more-than-15000-surveillance-cameras/
It'll be a great tool when it works to identify and locate a terrorist, but problematic as I see easy abuse.
---
New Yorkers Are Watched by More Than 15,000 Surveillance Cameras
People have only official assurances that the technology isn’t being used to invade their privacy.
Even as debates continue about pervasive government monitoring of our lives, surveillance technology is becoming more sophisticated and pervasive. New York City residents in just three boroughs live and work under the watchful gaze of over 15,000 cameras. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to run the images they capture through software that matches faces to identities—though not always reliably. The result is not just a loss of privacy for those under constant scrutiny, but also the potential for confrontations with law enforcement.
"The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to track people in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx by running images from 15,280 surveillance cameras into invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software," according to Amnesty International. "Thousands of volunteers from around the world participated in the investigation, tagging 15,280 surveillance cameras at intersections across Manhattan (3,590), Brooklyn (8,220) and the Bronx (3,470)."
The volunteers continue to count cameras in Queens and Staten Island to get a fuller picture of the extent of surveillance in the city. The NYPD is open about using facial recognition but claims that "[v]ideo from city-owned and private cameras is not analyzed unless it is relevant to a crime that has been committed."
Last summer, police laid siege to the apartment of Black Lives Matter activist Derrick Ingram after he allegedly yelled in an officer's ear through a megaphone during a demonstration. Police identified him through facial recognition technology that compared his image at the protest against photos on his Instagram account.
The use of images scraped from social media to populate databases for identification purposes is a hallmark of Clearview AI, a major provider of the technology. The tactic has enabled the company to accumulate billions of images while, as of early 2020, the FBI's own database contained 640 million. Clearview AI faces a lawsuit in California over its scraping practices and withdrew from Canada after being slapped with an investigation by that country's privacy commissioner.
While the sheer number of cameras monitoring New York City residents is high, the NYPD is hardly the only law-enforcement agency to attempt to implement a surveillance state. In April, Buzzfeed News acquired a listing of 1,803 publicly funded agencies that have used or are using Clearview's facial recognition tools. The listing likely understated the number of agencies making use of the technology, since many departments gain access to pooled resources through federally funded Regional Information Sharing Systems Centers.
Rest - https://reason.com/2021/06/07/new-yorkers-are-watched-by-more-than-15000-surveillance-cameras/