Comments on: Watching art imitate life

By: Henrietta W

Henrietta W — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:41:02 +0000

There is a big difference between a person happening to see you on the street and a camera recording all the details! A person might remember, but they won’t write it down.

Plus we already know how CCTV is abused even at the most basic level – the footage of you tripping on the pavement ends up on one of those TV programmes.

Properly-deployed and CCTV really can be useful, but having it everywhere we go is not to our benefit. Why are people so proud of their ‘nothing to hide’ status? Do we all carry see-through handbags?

By: Alan Connor

Alan Connor — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 08:49:40 +0000

I keep looking for clues that the Talkint CCTV story was an April Fool.

By: Spy Blog - SpyBlog.org.uk

Spy Blog - SpyBlog.org.uk — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:17:06 +0000

Artists and Surveillance technologies…

[hat tip: David Mery - calm, almost too calm via Bill Thompson -the billblog] Respected technology writer Bill Thompson is to chair a panel – Control Technology: Knowing Me, Knowing You – Ah ha! on Friday 27th April at the……

By: Dominic Self

Dominic Self — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:35:02 +0000

I’ve genuinely never understood the concern over CCTV, and I don’t believe most of the public do either.

A street, or bus, or shopping mall etc is surely a public place. I could sit by the road and watch people walk along the pavement all day. So a camera can do it better? So what? There seems to be a huge difference between the right to keep a private life and the ‘right’ to scrub myself from public existence completely.

In fact, many of the objections I’ve heard seem to focus on how the CCTV system ‘could’ be used. But if I wake up tomorrow in a totalitarian state, and get arrested for walking down the road in the wrong shade of blue, my reaction will not be “Damn! If only there hadn’t been a camera! Then I’d have been safe…”