Surveilling Alone
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
I’m a technical person, but the reality is that I’m only 90% sure I successfully transferred access to all of this stuff over to me. For the first couple weeks after moving in, we hadn’t even done that.
I’ve literally never looked at any of it. But knowing the kind of guy he was, there’s a part of me is honestly suspicious of not just the cameras, but also things like certain light fixtures. There’s even a clock we hate, hardwired into the wall, pointed directly at the master bedroom shower.
His potential access aside, I’ve said to my wife before that I don’t want our kids growing up feeling like they’re always being watched. Nefariously or not, even just the feeling of assuming that someone is watching has to have a profound impact on the way you develop.
You might find this presentation useful (!PDF!). https://defcon.org/images/defcon-22/dc-22-presentations/Pols...
Privacy is a human right. Best of luck!
But:
> There’s even a clock we hate, hardwired into the wall, pointed directly at the master bedroom shower
That wouldn't survive the night in my house.
It's not necessarily about the former owner being nefarious. If they reset devices before moving, or just abandoned the systems, they could be unpatched/exploitable, or even failing "open" from a security perspective.
Get a screwdriver!
This isn't really discussed enough. It's not just an impact on children's development, it's also an impact on adults.
If people think that they're being surveilled (whether or not they really are), that changes how they think and act. They can never really be themselves anymore. That effect is the entire reason that panopticons were invented. It's also a key part of the book "1984".
Personally, I think this means that ubiquitous surveillance is a form of psychological torture. Or, at best, it's a form of psychological manipulation.
It's poison to the very idea of community and society.
Are you suggesting people cannot be themselves when they are being watched through a camera? Wonder what the implications are in the social media era.
> MCLUHAN: And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity.
> They become alienated from themselves very quickly, and then they seek all sorts of bizarre outlets to establish some sort of identity by put-ons. Show business had been one way of establishing identity by just put-ons. And without the put-on, you're a nobody. And so people are learning show business as an ordinary daily way of survival. It's called role-playing.
https://www.tvo.org/transcript/155847/marshall-mcluhan-in-co...
Yes, this is really well established. Not just through a camera, either. This happens with all kinds of surveillance.
For instance, when people are aware of relatively innocuous things such as software telemetry or that streaming services are paying attention to what you watch, they will use the software or streaming differently than if they aren't aware of it.
The classic example of this is from the days of Neilsen TV ratings. Neilsen families would routinely do things like ensuring that they let their favorite shows play on the TV even if they aren't watching them out of a fear that if they don't, they're increasing the chances that the show will get cancelled.
Or a more modern example: how many people have decided to watch or not watch something on YouTube or other streaming service with an eye toward manipulating the personalized recommendations the service provides?
This is also one of McLuhan's points. If we think we have an audience, our thoughts and actions tend to become performative for that audience rather than authentic.
I grew up like this, and it probably made me more paranoid and prone to rebel against authority. My dad set up security cameras outside and inside the house. I kind of understood the outside cameras, though he only did it after he found out I brought my girlfriend over when they weren't home. The last straw was when he set up a camera behind my desk pointing at my monitor.
I was 16 and already mad I couldn't bring my girlfriend over, but the camera pointing at my desk put me over the edge. So I ssh'd in using the default admin password, rooted it, and rm -rf /*.
Was the existing system a big reason why you bought the house?
Rip it all out and install your own stuff!
China does this, too but not as effectively, perhaps due to them not getting our culture as well.
1. This is just from my experiencing chasing sock puppets on Twitter. And sockpuppets are everywhere on Twitter. You've already encountered them. They typically make you mad, or discontent, or angry toward your supposed fellow Americans. Presumably they do this on other social networks, also.
Fewer pavements to walk and to arrange cafes alongside of, a lack of a market square to meet, more locked doors, more guns, more surveillance, more distrust - all contribute to the distruction of the community.
I see this kind of parallel a lot but I think it's missing the key points of "human" vs. "tech" surveillance. Conversations could be overheard since the beginning of time but that would never justify recording every sound you'll ever make just because of the vague apparent similarity. A more vivid example is that being seen naked is very different from being photographed naked.
Ubiquitous high quality equipment, cheap and plentiful storage, access to many different sources of information, and algorithms to process and correlate all that have made surveillance so much more than the natural "I occasionally see/hear something and commit to memory some vague, ever changing info that can never leave my head".
Modern surveillance is in bulk, it stores every relevant bit indeterminately, it can recall in vivid detail, correlate different data points from all over the surveillance network, create patterns across time and space, and easily share all of that. Things that are out of reach for any individual or group of humans.
Your internal surveillance system is fully within your control and mostly surveils you so that's good and a different world from cloud based external surveillance. But such a system still "surveils" more than a human could when it comes to other family members or guests just by its mere existence. Things that would go unnoticed, or easily forgotten don't have to anymore. That's a danger in itself because it cerates the social acceptability of permanent surveillance. Your kids don't get to break that vase and quickly hide the evidence because your system saved a snapshot. When that becomes normal for a person, being watched by every neighbor's Ring is a tiny extra step.
Disclosure, I run a setup similar to yours based on Frigate while taking great care to not intrude on anyone else's privacy because local laws and people don't take kindly to that. I am feeling that I'm invading my family's privacy though, which is why it tends to be on only when nobody else is at home.
Mine is only on the outside of the house. I also don't have it set to alert, so I'm only reviewing it if I discover a problem in some other way - this is actually less intrusive than the grandma scenario. I view private property surveillance as normal - stores have been doing this for over a generation already. I do agree that public surveillance, or the collation/centralization of private surveillance is a big problem.
I had just been considering that maybe we were fortunate enough to live through a local maximum of privacy: people in villages had less, and people in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longhouse cultures much less.
(In https://barykin-pin-up.ru/#/i/neudachnoe-svidanie the young couple seems to have been hoping to get a little privacy via an afternoon rendezvous, but her neighbourhood is as, or even more, curious than the cat...)
I can't imagine more than 0.001% of people who use security cameras do that.
> suspicious
"I don't know this person, ergo they must be suspicious." WTF, no, stop it. People have a right to be on public property and easements like sidewalks. They don't have a right to loiter, but they have a right to pass through the area. Yes, criminals do it, but so do teenagers having fun, and so do people with more legitimate reasons to be somewhere, and we can't be interrogating all of them all the time, and we (society) don't have the right to be detaining and interrogating people who have not yet committed a crime or conspired to commit a crime, or even people who have -unknown to us- committed a crime for which we have zero evidence, not even probable cause.
This sort of paranoia can lead to completely unnecessary encounters with police that can escalate when the person refuses to go along with unreasonable police demands for ID or whatever, then end up being a police abuse victim.
Please stop this behavior.
I mostly did this in central London where everyone is a stranger anyway, but there is nothing suspicious about doing it anywhere.
America is nuts
Anyone who has ever experienced even petty property crime knows that the police are nearly useless and if you don't hand them all the information needed to recover your losses on a silver platter, they won't bother. The reason I invest in surveillance at all is to ensure I have something to cover my bases when I need to file an insurance claim and involve the police, but only when an /actual/ crime against my property or person has happened. I am not at all concerned about random people walking down the sidewalk and I can't imagine why I ever would be.
Imagine we all had cameras attached to us streaming every moment of our lives to a server 24/7. You'd have suddenly eliminated nearly all crime outside those of passion, because the chances of being caught would be essentially 100%. Mandate everybody wear full-on biohazard suits outdoors anytime you're in public then you would have effectively eliminated any sort of spread of communicable disease.
These would be amazing achievements, far greater than many of the undesirable solutions might even imagine achieving. Yet paradoxically these actions would also make life far less worth living. Put more succinctly, how do you know we aren't currently going backwards?
This sounds absolutely worth the "cost." If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear; for this reason I fully embrace total surveillance, online and offline, of all citizens, 24/7.
> If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear
What if you're in a country/locale that, for example, makes same sex relationships illegal? You do have to hide it now, and so you do have to fear. Who gets to determine what has to be hidden?
That only works in a fascist or authoritarian society. People in social democratic nations have differing opinions on what is right or wrong.
This is assuming that's how it would shake out (but I don't think it really is):
Not to me. I'd rather live free in a world where crime exists than constantly watched in a world where it doesn't.
First we discover, then we research, then we implement, then we assess the implementation.
Sometimes the assessment shows us that the implementation was incorrect. Sometimes the assessment shows us that the original discovery or research was incorrect. Sometimes the assessment shows us unintended consequences for our actions and implementations.
Ever see a city that closes down roadways to vehicular traffic, so that bicycles and foot traffic are more prevalent there?
That's moving backwards.