About half an hour’s walk from where I live in London is a lovely house in which George Orwell lived prior to writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s a pretty quiet part of the city – not the kind of place he would have used as inspiration for the book, I’d bet. But if he’d popped out his front door and strolled for a few minutes he’d have been on top of Parliament Hill where he could look down on one of most – if not the most – surveilled cities in the world.
Everywhere you go in London you’re being watched. We’re the stars of CCTV, as Hard-Fi put it. The scale of coverage is phenomenal – the country as a whole has over three million CCTV cameras; the city itself has 800 cameras placed in 200 entry-points which can scan and track 3,000 license plates an hour each (yep, two and a half million an hour all up). And that’s just the entry-points…
Along with this massive deployment of hardware come some pretty incredible applications being developed which could really crank up the power of this tool. Algorithms are being developed which can be applied to video footage real-time to spot inappropriate behaviour – meaning police can identify the potential for trouble and intervene to stop it happening. Facial recognition software is already being used to match people captured on CCTV footage to stored images of wanted criminals, again in real-time. You don’t need the donut-munching, coffee-swilling retired cop with his feet up on the desk watching CCTV screens anymore – these tools will alert the authorities automatically when they find a match or spot someone doing something wrong.
While this kind of thing might raise the eyebrows of an out-of-towner, arguments against CCTV surveillance don’t stick so much in London these days. In a town with enemies, the population is willing to be watched if it helps stop the bad guys. [Even though it didn't a year and a half ago, but that's another issue]. Big Brother is welcome here.
But there’s another, less intrusive tool with comparable potential for surveillance that has to a certain extent snuck in the door, and is actually being driven directly by us. It’s the online, collaborative world of the internet. Time magazine’s person of the year was…well, You. Obviously not You, specifically (though the gimmicky mirror-cover puts you in the hot seat) - Time was referring to the online "community and collaboration on a scale never seen before" that was witnessed in 2006. Articles about YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace etc – the heavy hitters of online collaborative culture – were included, and quintessential users were documented to give a picture of that world and its netizens. The main premise was that the online world is increasing at a rapid rate, through the voluntary effort made by a huge – and growing – population.
If you thought the number of CCTV cameras in the UK was impressive, consider the scale of some of these online communities:
- There were 130 million MySpace accounts as of November 2006. An estimated 230,000 new accounts are created each day.
- PhotoBucket – the biggest photo hosting website – has 32 million users and gets a further 65,000 per day. It has 10 million unique visitors per month and they look at 1.5 billion images a day. Oh, PhotoBucket’s market share is around 42% so double all those numbers to get a rough idea of the size of the industry.
- YouTube – the biggest video hosting site, serving around 60% of all videos – serves 100 million videos per day and receives a new video every second.
- Blogs – Gartner predicts that the number of blogs will hit 100 million this year.
So it is, in a word, big. And adding content to this digital world is getting easier by the day. With a little bit of know-how it’s quite simple to write and publish blogs, and capture and post photos and video directly from your cellphone to the ‘net. It’s also possible to categorise your photos using automatic face recognition to note which of your mates are in which snaps, and to use cell towers to tag the location in which they were taken.
And in the not-too-distant future (in fact, it’s already being worked on), you’ll be able to stream footage from a portable video camera directly to the web. Interestingly, some groups are employing this technology to critique surveillance but it could well become a tool used exactly for that purpose.
Which is my point. In capturing and documenting our lives online we’re providing a potential surveillance feed of ourselves – and of those around us. It’s not too much of a leap – technically and mentally - to a scenario where the algorithms being developed for use on CCTV footage start to be applied to video uploaded to sites such as YouTube. Similarly, the facial recognition software used to match known criminals to the footage fed by the entry-point cameras in London could quite easily be turned to the massive databases of both video and still photos we store. When you chuck in geo-tagging using cell towers, and the time and date saved with your files, it’s possible that you are providing whoever wants to see it with a complete record of where you’ve been, when you were there, who you were with and what you were doing. And as network speeds and devices improve, the ability to stream video from webcams in your house or in your hand means that this record will be available real-time.
Of course it’s possible that whoever may want to monitor this online world can’t yet draw a link between your virtual identity and your physical self. How are they to know that it’s you sneaking a spliff down that alley under the blinking red eye of a CCTV camera or that’s a video of you shouting ‘Bush Lied; Thousands Died’ recorded on your girlfriend’s cellphone at the anti Iraq war rally?
That gap is closing. For some time visitors to the US have been made to stand in line and be photographed upon arrival (even in transit, the bastards). There’s also been a meandering debate which has inched to a close whereby the government of that same country now require airlines to provide eMail addresses (and credit card details) of incoming passengers. So, they now have your photo and your name and your eMail address. That photo could be used to match you to footage from CCTV or the web, and your eMail address can track not only your communication, but link you to any online profiles you create.
There are of course societal blockers to all of this – there are at least two things you can do as an individual. First, lobby government and hope like hell they don’t follow what the US is doing (that is, if they’re not already). Second, be a touch savvy about how you set up your online life and try and create a separate identity for that world.
But the big question is – do we actually care enough to do that?
[This post is continued in 'Watch Yourself (Part II)'; if you'd like to read more about the defence of your rights in the digital realm, check out the European Digital Rights site]
Thought provoking article Matt. My niece Rosie read it and forwarded it to a friend her age(11) who she felt was not careful enough to keep her personal details confidential when on sites on the web.
nice matt, that face recognition software (riya) rocks. but what if you don’t have a face but a poly-morphic, 3d matrix like that can also turn invisible, like me?
Very concerning Matt. Maybe my refusal to visit the US is not enough (I may have to take the next step and get one of those poly-morphic faces….).
It really gets me thinking when reading about things such as this, ie – huge effort and money being spent on things that have arguably no positive affect (or probably a negative affect). What amazing things could be achieved if such a concentrated effort was put into positive things. What if the people and money that were consumed with this perceived problem put all this effort into something meaningful? Pick any example such as the one that you have highlighted and replace it with something that would have a positive effect on society…… what would happen?
Grrrrrrrrr.