Jun 26: Smile, you're on CCTV

Every city is under surveillance by thousands of cameras, monitoring and recording our activity.

Sometimes these are useful: capturing images of missing people, or the alleged perpetrators of crimes.

One additional level of surveillance has come with the arrival of video door bells: a camera which connects to the internet and can be linked to via a smartphone app. This excellent article in the Observer magazine explores the way that the installation of these devices, which link with apps and stream to the internet have produced a new surveillance network without people realising it. Each installation adds to the petabytes of data being collected on our movements. This could be used in positive ways - particularly when tracing the movements of suspicious vehicles, or missing people, but could also be used to infringe on our liberties (what remains of them)

Image: Alan Parkinson

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