The Star covers CCTV cameras on Yonge and Dundas. ⇒
8 January 2007, late morning
They want to install CCTV cameras in my neighbourhood -- I think this a bad idea.
This is a post from my link log: If you click the title of this post you will be taken the web page I am discussing.
Why exactly? I too think it’s bad, but when posed with the question of why, I could only think of one reason: “the potential for abuse.”
That’s my gut reaction, but I’m sure lots of good could come out of it too. My feeling is that the CCTV coverage in London is incredibly vast but it seems like hooliganism is on the rise too, so how effective is it at preventing crime?
by haran on January 8 2007, 6:09 pm #
As far as I can tell, they don’t prevent crime (there was a shooting at Yonge and Dundas after they were installed) and the potential for abuse is quite great. Reading about how CCTV cameras are used in Britain really turned me off them. I don’t think they’d make my neighbourhood safer. At the very least they’ll make it look uglier.
by ramanan on January 8 2007, 6:48 pm #
Maybe it’s because I’m over 30, because when I was in my twenties, this shit would have infuriated me…but now that I’m older, I realize that a public place is a public place, and if you’re not doing anything wrong, who cares if they’re filming?
Do you think that police are poring over 47,839,809,5820 hours worth of boring video tape to catch your ass picking your nose?
No.
They’re waiting until something happens and then they’re referring to it and watching it to catch some criminal who really hurt someone.
Especially in this city of Toronto, where shit happens and people who see it don’t say shit.
No, it didn’t stop that guy from getting shot, but the tape might catch the guy who did it.
by radmila on January 8 2007, 11:06 pm #
If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide.
Should I be required to think about the implications of having everything I do in public on film? I don’t think so. Do I care if a CCTV camera catches me giving a Shima a kiss? I don’t, but she might: she’s shy. Do I care if it catches me reading The Communist Manifesto. No, but who knows, maybe in the future that might bite me in the ass. Do I need to make sure my blinds are always closed in order to make sure cameras aren’t peering in. How about when they switch to ones that record infrared as well?
The ACLU sums up most of my objections to CCTV nicely: What’s wrong with public video surveillance.
Also, barely related, this movie looks awesome.
by ramanan on January 9 2007, 11:00 am #
I don’t know, I suppose I’m getting too old to care about cameras in public. I’m assuming that the key word there is “public” and if you’re out in public there is no privacy.
What’s the difference between a person seeing what you do, and a camera seeing what you do? A person can lie about what they saw, or take it out of context, just like a camera’s video tape can be taken out of context.
by Radmila on January 9 2007, 11:33 am #