WHAT IS IT?

 

Closed-circuit television cameras are the type of surveillance with which most of us are most familiar—and most comfortable. We’ve lived most of our lives under the eyes of cameras hidden behind little black domes in ceilings or bolted in clusters to the corners of buildings. The presence of CCTV cameras has become so ubiquitous as to be comforting—a darkened parking lot is filled with menace until we notice the security cameras keeping watch over us. The surveillance of public space is an accepted and even welcomed thing.

In recent years, however, cameras have multiplied to occupy niches in almost every part of our lives. They’ve been mounted behind the mirrors in dressing rooms and in the corners of public bathrooms. They hang from the ceilings of our places of work. They’re mounted in the dashboards of police cruisers and atop our computer screens. Everyone around you is carrying one, and many of them live with their fingers on the record button, just in case something interesting happens.

The increasing omnipresence of cameras is not an illusion. More than 4 million security cameras are currently in operation in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the number is probably even higher. From the moment you leave the house in the morning to the moment you lock the door behind you in the evening, there will be very few gaps in the video record of your day. If you are in a car accident or a fight, attention becomes even more intense as dozens of bystanders pull out their cell phones to take video.

There was a time when all of these cameras existed just to protect us or guard the sanctity of our high-value property. Now, they exist mostly to guard the petty property of department stores from minor theft, to catch us speeding, or to record us at our worst. Sometime in the recent past, cameras graduated from saving us from the worst elements of society to attempting to catch us behaving poorly or foolishly. Most of the cameras around us are not operated in the hope of stopping a kidnapper; they’re there in the hope of scoring a YouTube hit by recording you getting hit in the crotch with a cricket bat.

For the most part, privacy concerns about the increasing prevalence of security cameras and the knee-jerk tendency of the citizenry to videotape everything have been ignored. In the UK, CCTV cameras are supposed to be registered and regulated by a public authority, but compliance with that law is spotty. In the United States, it’s considered good form to tell people when they might be videotaped changing their clothes, and surveillance systems in dressing rooms aren’t supposed to be able to record anything, but there’s no verification requirement. Some police organizations have tried to make it illegal to videotape police in the course of their work, but those efforts have largely failed. The general rule that seems to be taking shape over the last decade is that anything you do outside your house is fair game—if you’re willing to do it in front of your neighbors, you should be prepared to do it in front of the entire Internet.