WHY SHOULD YOU BE WORRIED ABOUT IT?
In September of 2010, two students at Rutgers University—Molly Wei and Dharun Ravi—used a webcam to surreptitiously stream a video of Ravi’s roommate Tyler Clementi hooking up with another man. Ravi invited his followers on Twitter to join him in watching his roommate be gay—which, when you think about it, is a pretty gay way to make fun of someone for being gay.
This invasion of privacy almost certainly contributed to Celementi’s decision, a few days later, to jump to his death from the George Washington Bridge.
What Ravi and Wei did was illegal—they could each face as much as ten years in prison—but it was not uncommon or difficult. Most of the camera lenses around you lie dormant, waiting for the chance to catch you doing something strange or humiliating. In most cases, those incidents will not occur in a private bedroom, but in the public sphere, where the law is much more loose about what can and cannot be recorded and distributed on the Internet.
Ravi and Wei were only caught because they offered to share the video feed of Clementi’s hookup. Had they simply recorded the video for their own use, it would still have been illegal, but they never would have been caught. Anyone with access to your computer could do the same. Video captured in this manner could easily be distributed anonymously at a later date or used privately as blackmail material.
Of course, the quiet brutality of this act is only the symptom of a deeper issue. As video surveillance has become more and more prevalent, we have become more comfortable with it. The expectation of privacy has decreased. We are annoyed, but not shocked, that we might be caught partially naked on camera while we try on pants at the department store. We experience a mild sense of injustice by video surveillance at our place of work when our parents would have been sickened.
The private realms into which video surveillance is expanding represent a loss of our right to privacy. Our movements around the city or the nation can now be tracked from camera to camera. Facial recognition technology makes it easier than ever before for the police or a corporation to know, step by step, the routes we take from place to place. The more time we spend on camera, the less time we spend as free individuals.