Public Surveillance: A Battle Between Privacy and Safety

-- By ChengyuanZhou? - 29 Nov 2024

What Do You Pay for Your Safety？

Are you willing to give up a certain level of personal privacy for the purpose of improving social security? Most people would say yes. However, people hardly have the right to determine how much of their privacy would be shared with the government. Another group of people simply argue that public surveillance can't promote social governance at all. There is also such a concern that we would live in a world as described in the book 1984, where people's every movement is monitored by the government. Anyway, with the development of modern technology, the intensity, breadth, and depth of government surveillance will inevitably increase to a new level in the foreseeable future.

Public Surveillance and Public Health

China has more cameras than any other country in the world. Outside of China, the cities with the most CCTV cameras include Delhi, Seoul, Moscow, New York and London. In addition to preventing crime and tracking criminals, public surveillance system can also be used in other areas, such as traffic enforcement, handling public emergencies and improving community management level.

Another important format of public surveillance is monitoring your online activities and your communications with others. It’s a common practice that the police often arrest people for posting comments on social media that endanger public safety. By monitoring the network, they also punish acts that have very bad social impacts, such as child pornography. Spies and terrorist attacks are another story, where such surveillance are not subject to restrictions made by the law.

However, the operation of police power always has the tendency of expansion, and in this process the limit and scope of the original power may be ignored, thus leading to the violation of civil rights. Public surveillance by itself cannot constitute a serious violation of civil rights, the problem is that when it is combined with other government regulatory means, the potential harm is incalculable. For example, if you belong to a group of people concerned by the government, it can know where you appear and track your movements, if you are detected by the facial recognition system of the cameras. Also, many agencies that work with the government will illegally sell your personal information to third parties after obtaining it. Although the government usually claims that people's personal privacy will be respected, you would never know how much of your privacy information has been collected by the government. Your blogs, your chats with other people, the websites you visit, all such information could be easily acquired by the government without your knowledge. If you are not identified by the government as a priority, you are safe as an ordinary person, who seldom goes against the government. If you are, you should be careful.

The Involvement of Artificial Intelligence

In the monitoring system, the application of AI has greatly enhanced the traditional monitoring ability. AI surveillance systems are able to process video data in real time to identify potential threats, such as unattended property or suspicious behavior. This proactive approach allows security personnel to respond quickly to incidents so that preventive measures can be taken in time before the occurrence of potential crimes. For example, many countries are using AI technology for facial recognition, which is widely used in areas such as government buildings and airports. In the field of network security, the role of AI is equally significant. AI technology can significantly reduce the identification time of network incidents. By monitoring citizens’ social media and online activities, governments can use AI to automatically identify those who pose a threat to national and public security and take preventive measures. The technology has raised new concerns about the impact of public surveillance on citizens' privacy.

Resist or Regulate

A strong argument supporting public surveillance is that it can prevent crimes and catch criminals effectively. However, this argument does not hold water. While surveillance cameras do help law enforcement catch criminals, the government doesn't have enough people to identify and track criminals among tens of thousands of cameras. Moreover, the cameras don't seem to help prevent crime. Many criminals are not afraid of cameras at all by simply wearing masks or making crimes in the middle of the night. Cameras along are not enough to deter crimes. Only when the surveillance information is combined with other location information, such as GPS information and third-party software travel information, can the government identify criminals and locate them more accurately. In Baltimore, the Police Department implemented the Baltimore Aerial Investigation Research (AIR) program to track movements linked to serious crimes. It combines aerial surveillance technologies, traditional ground surveillance, and human analysts. This practice, while efficient, is a serious violation of citizens' privacy. It's just a surveillance program under the sun. In unknown corners, vast surveillance systems are used to track phone records, Internet activity and the travel routes of citizens, many of which are just spying on people under the guise of promoting public health.

Public surveillance needs to be resisted. However, with the continuous development of surveillance technology and the need for governments to deter crimes, this trend is becoming irreversible. The government has introduced a large number of laws to regulate surveillance, to show that their surveillance is reasonable and proportionate to the potential crime threat, but this is not enough. The moment citizens are captured by surveillance cameras, they are no longer the owners of their personal information. The law can only allow citizens to obtain compensation after their privacy rights have been violated, and the regulations can only reveal the way the monitoring systems work on paper. The tension between public and private interests leads to the inevitable conflict between the installation and use of public surveillance systems and the right of privacy belonging to citizens.

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