New CCTV Site In UK Pays People To Watch 214
pyrosine writes "Have you ever felt like being paid for watching live CCTV footage? The BBC are reporting CCTV site, 'Internet Eyes' is doing exactly that. Offering up to £1000 to people who report suspicious activity, the scheme seems an easy way to make money. Not everyone is pleased with the scheme though; the Information Commissioner's Office is worried it will lead to voyeurism or misuse, but what difference does it make when you can find said webcams with a simple Google search?"
One difference (Score:2)
but what difference does it make when you can find said webcams with a simple Google search?"
You could get paid £1000 for your voyeurism.
Re:One difference (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like most voyeurs will end up paying the company, not the other way around:
http://interneteyes.co.uk/community/index.html [interneteyes.co.uk]
It's £1.99/month or £12.99/year to use the site. To do marginally better than breaking even you'd need to pay annually and watch it for 2 hrs/day, which can get you back £1.50/month, but the only large payment mentioned explicity is £1000 for 'the Viewer who receives the most award points'. More like a paid-entry competition than a job.
Re:One difference (Score:5, Funny)
"Linking to our site
You may not link any other site to our website."
Whoops - and now I have as well
Re:One difference (Score:5, Funny)
This part is funnier:
You may not use our website, or material available through our website:
[...]
In a way that abuse or invade [sic] another's privacy, [...]
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What do I say? I say it looks like you dropped a close italics tag.
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Why would you discourage people from linking to your website?
Its a local website for local people [the3dstudio.com].
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> Why would you discourage people from linking to your website?
Depends on if you have half a brain... Or not...
Re:One difference (Score:4, Funny)
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I once worked on a site that had terms and conditions that explicitly denied the right to cache the content of the site, including in caching proxies and on your hard drive. It's like they wanted to pay for as much bandwidth as they could.
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One pound fifty a month for two hours a day?
Jesus H Christ. The only people who will bother with this are the folks who are already curtain-twitchers by nature, and who have really got nothing to do with their lives.
FTFAQ - "Viewers can monitor for as much or as little as they want. Extended viewing is rewarded"
A quid fifty for sixty hours. You couldn't even buy a pint with that, but then you won't have time either, and if you're the sort of person this appeals to you probably think that 'public houses' are
Surveillance = False accusation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Surveillance = False accusation (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't feel threatened by surveillance cameras in public places at all, indeed, I feel safer knowing that if someone does pull some shit, there's at least a possibility that there'll be some footage of it...
Once the surveillance gets into our homes and private work spaces and whatnot, then that's a problem, and a serious one...
Re:Surveillance = False accusation (Score:5, Insightful)
Most crimes are committed in boardrooms and government. Let's put CCTV there.
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Well, unlike you [White Shade] I feel that so-called wholesale surveillance, if left unregulated, even "just" in public places, would become a threat, a violation of everyone's right to privacy and dignity.
Today we have cameras. To prevent crime we're told (but studies seem to indicate that doesn't work). UK especially. More and more, networked, centralized. With now Joe Sixpack watching too (brilliant, really). Plus license plate OCR to enforce traffic restrictions, with such info logged to some big-ass da
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You know that when you step outside your door, other people can actually see you, right? Your Mak'tar stealth haze isn't working.
If you want to protect your privacy from prying eyes, you can wear a hoodie, burqa or that tiresome de rigueur V mask that all the cool paranoid kids are sporting, anywhere you like in public, without let or hindrance. The UK isn't France.
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You must be lost - this is a thread about the privacy implications, not the effectiveness or cost. Perhaps you meant to piggyback your opinion somewhere else?
I'll put my opinions where I like. Until the Freedoms of Speech are further restricted, I'll say what I want.
I realise it's out of context, but YOU said the only reason the public dislike CCTV is because they're being watched in public. That is such a horrific and uneducated mistake, that it needed correcting.
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Because I used to have my email address in the public domain in the pre-spam days of the Internet. Once spam came about, that address got completely swamped to the point of being unusable.
I don't mind random people having my email address, if they just want to send me questions, or have a decent chat.. I do object to having it harvested by spammers and used to deluge me with random irritations.
If I found that appearing on a CCTV camera caused me to have a deluge of spam mails through my letterbox, you can
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Except that it has been shown time and time again that CCTV does nothing to _prevent_ crime and only a bit to _solve cases_. Hint: The police have perfected being good at working without CCTV over the last few hundred years. I can create more work, though.
If you want to _prevent_ crime you need street lights and more police on the streets. Oh, and a fast, efficient justice system that deals swift and just justice so there is no mental disconnect between "I broke $law" and "I get punished". Again, this has b
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Except that it has been shown time and time again that CCTV does nothing to _prevent_ crime and only a bit to _solve cases_. Hint: The police have perfected being good at working without CCTV over the last few hundred years. I can create more work, though.
If you want to _prevent_ crime you need street lights and more police on the streets. Oh, and a fast, efficient justice system that deals swift and just justice so there is no mental disconnect between "I broke $law" and "I get punished". Again, this has been shown again and again.
Spot on.
CCTV solves 1 in 1000 crimes, cost £2000 per camera, per year.
Street lamps stop around 20% of crimes.
I don't suppose they cost that much do they?
I do feel threatened by cameras (Score:2)
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If someone does pull shit, that camera isn't going to stop them, and there is no police around to do so, because the cameras proved to be much cheaper than having actual people walking around interacting with the citizens.
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Yeah, think of the children!
This is obviously going to cause far more crime than it stops, because currently nobody can sit on a park bench and observe people passing by, and when they know there are cameras in public places they're a lot more likely to try and kidnap children!
Got any more stupid arguments you'd like to trot out as excuses so that nobody can watch you while you're shopping?
I'm a lot more likely than most people to get into trouble from CCTV, as I'm out doing Parkour several times a week, in
Re:Surveillance = False accusation (Score:5, Informative)
Got any more stupid arguments you'd like to trot out as excuses so that nobody can watch you while you're shopping?
Sure, I'll bite.
I think you're forgetting that CCTV is used as evidence, and since it's "unbiased", it must be admissible, and 100% accurate evidence.
Of course, Judges and Police don't often realise that mistakes are often made with CCTV [bigbrotherwatch.org.uk], nor that it's bloody expensive to keep it running [thisislondon.co.uk], and would be cheaper to employ police instead.
I'd rather get arrested for climbing a wall, than have a mugger or rapist go free because there is no evidence.
That is, until they lock you up thinking you are a mugger/rapist?
That's not just your problem. Then we've got an innocent person in jail, and a mugger/rapist that the police has stopped looking for.
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That is, until they lock you up thinking you are a mugger/rapist?
That's not just your problem. Then we've got an innocent person in jail, and a mugger/rapist that the police has stopped looking for.
That seems to be a bit of a strawman considering mistakes are made all the time without CCTV too. With really crappy quality CCTV it isn't that much use as evidence (I should know our CCTV system completely sucks here at work, wish they'd get a decent system), but with high quality stuff it's a lot more useful. A lot of businesses around here run their own CCTV, it isn't costing the government anything. The Police occasionally request some footage of certain times if there's been dodgy goings on on our stre
Re:Surveillance = False accusation (Score:5, Informative)
That is, until they lock you up thinking you are a mugger/rapist? That's not just your problem. Then we've got an innocent person in jail, and a mugger/rapist that the police has stopped looking for.
That seems to be a bit of a strawman considering mistakes are made all the time without CCTV too. With really crappy quality CCTV it isn't that much use as evidence (I should know our CCTV system completely sucks here at work, wish they'd get a decent system), but with high quality stuff it's a lot more useful. A lot of businesses around here run their own CCTV, it isn't costing the government anything. The Police occasionally request some footage of certain times if there's been dodgy goings on on our street (which there often are as we live next to one of the roughest areas in the city).
Of course mistakes are made with other systems, but they don't cost £200 million to solve 10 crimes over ten years [thisislondon.co.uk].
CCTV was originally called a PREVENTATIVE measure. It hasn't worked. So what happens now? The Government push for more, and more.
I'd prefer that £200 million to pay for the 666 new police officers we could've had for the last ten years, not some childs' plaything.
You don't best stop crime by constantly monitoring people. You best stop crime by trust and education.
Re:Surveillance = False accusation (Score:4, Insightful)
Where in that article does it say they only solved 10 crimes?
That's per year. It's simple mathematics. Says in the article there are 10,000 cameras, It also says that 1 in 1000 crimes are solved by CCTV per year.
It's saying crime has dropped by around 20% in each area.
Where does it say that? It says the clear-up rate for crimes is around 22% - but it generally has always been around that figure - 78% of crimes are unsolved.
It does say underneath "the money spent on cameras would be better used on street lighting, which has been shown to cut crime by up to 20 per cent." - that seems a far better choice to spend money on.
I'm happy with things like putting in better lighting rather than cameras if it's shown to better cut crime levels
Agreed.
(though both is ideal because then you still have a record of the remaining 80% of crimes still happening in the streets).
Doesn't work like that. Installing street lighting would decrease it by 20%. Installing CCTV would decrease it by 0.1%, and probably not further. The two are quite exclusive!
Also, the cost of CCTV (£2000/year) has got to be far greater than installing street lighting.
My main issue with people's arguments here is not about the effectiveness of CCTV anyway, it's frustration at the attitude that they shouldn't be filmed while out in public.
I haven't a problem with being filmed in public, so long as it is used properly. Being checked on occasionally is fine. Being followed around by a CCTV operator with a stalking obsession; or using it to blackmail my non-existent wife - isn't. We don't even know what the controls on CCTV are - but I know someone who is a CCTV operator, and knowing the kind of guy he is, really worried me.
I think it's a great thing to be doing, especially considering for example some of the abuses of Police power going on that we're only able to see now with the popularity of YouTube.
I'd agree if it wasn't for things like the attack on a 50 year old man [youtube.com], coming home from work, recorded on camera, beaten by police from behind; and the police being let off. More details here [wikipedia.org]. It's certainly not the first time CCTV has been ignored - or as others have mentioned, damming evidence on CCTV completely disappearing.
The more people are aware that they are accountable, the better behaved they are.
I've worked for a number of years in schools, and have met a number of drugs users. In schools at least, the less you trust the students, the more trouble they cause. We had a unusual trick of those students being caught 'hacking' (sic), were given more access, and not punished. It worked unbelievably well. It's not necessarily accountability that makes people better behaved, but often is down to education, or a feeling of unfairness in life.
Being constantly watched only helps to promote paranoia to all people, you can see this by the number of people scared of CCTV! I'm sure that common criminals and drug users are far less caring about being caught.
Not only that, but CCTV is crap anyway. Have you ever tried it yourself? Imagine quite how bad it is.
You've seen yourself, the crime figures seem to indicate that CCTV doesn't help anyway, and certainly is costing a lot more money and stopping crime less than it would just to install street lighting.
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It just makes you want to steal things doesn't it? :)
Indeed. Most of the engineers have access to a printer that's located in a room full of paper, spare IT equipment etc. This manager wanted to restrict access to only managers in case people stole things, and her example was some mice lying out on a shelf, which cost £5 each. We're paying our engineers £40k a year and she was worried about £5 mice and buying cheaper coffee for the coffee machines.
I hate that attitude, being so ready to make work a living hell for people, for the sake of sav
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However, I still think CCTV is beneficial to society as a whole. I'd rather get arrested for climbing a wall, than have a mugger or rapist go free because there is no evidence.
Would you rather have a reformer politician blackmailed into silence because the entrenched powers acquired a clip of him entering a motel with a hooker? Even if he she just happened to be walking in the lobby door at the same time as him?
Then there's that funny thing - CCTV footage getting "lost" [wikimedia.org] when it would have contained official misconduct.
The pantopticon is a tool of the powerful for the powerful sold to the citizens by convincing them that they are weak.
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Although I do agree with most of what you have said, there is one thing.
A LOT of the CCTVs in councils in the UK, are currently being used by their operators to spot parking/bus lane offenses (which earn revenue in fines). Now, I dont mind this in essensce, but when ever I go to some council areas (Such as Harrow and Hounslow) all I see is the CCTV cameras pointing to the bus lanes trying to fine motorists, than actually trying to survey the whole area.
One day (if it hasnt happend already) a crime is going
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There are good reasons not to want to be observed even if you did nothing wrong.
Such as?
Most of these guys are complaining that these cameras even exist. I agree it's pretty pointless to just sit there watching all day unless you're actually a security guard, but I definitely think having the cameras in place and recording is positive.
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So? The real story there is not about CCTV, it's about Police abuse of power. It happened to me the other day that an officer was trying to tell me not to do something, when he couldn't actually tell me what law I was breaking. The fact he didn't like it and he had a uniform and a Police car seemed to him to be enough reason to try and tell me what to do.
Stories like this don't mean we should stop making use of technology, they show that we should place better safeguards against abuse of power, and educate
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I suppose you also switch off logging on all your computers, in good faith that everything will work perfectly and you won't ever need to find out what happened in the case of a problem?
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I suppose you also switch off logging on all your computers, in good faith that everything will work perfectly and you won't ever need to find out what happened in the case of a problem?
If it cost me £2,000 per year per log file, meaning I've spent £200 million over ten years to solve 1/1000 problems - yeah, I'd do without log files.
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No-one should be spying on me unless they have a pre-existing, genuine good faith suspicion that I'm up to no good
But looking at you when you are in a public place is not "spying". Heck, we all have to close our eyes because Your Highness wishes to walk down the public street? Yeah right. You know there are cameras everywhere pointed at you. Some of them are owned by the government. Some of them are privately owned. If one day video of you picking your nose in your car emerges on the i
Full reward list (Score:2)
Suspicious activity: $1000
Actual crime: $1500
Violence: +$500
Murder: +$1000
For each aditional victim over the first: +$500
Nude man: $0.25
Nude woman: $50
Performing sexual activities: *5
Celebrities: (See annex)
Special prices: (See "I found Wally!" annex)
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Great, you just need a friend with fast legs, willing to work for a 20% cut.
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Nude man: $0.25 Nude woman: $50
Isn't that gender discrimination
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Catching the politician who sponsored this going into a hotel with a prostitute: Priceless
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Crimes Solved: 10 per year [guardian.co.uk]
Cost to solve once crime with CCTV: £2 million per crime.
Crimes per year: 4.4 million [wikipedia.org]
Crimes solved by police: 22%
Police: 136,000
Crimes solved per year: 968,000
Crimes solved per officer per year: 7
Average Police wage: £30,000
Cost to solve one crime: less than £5,000.
I don't see how this is workable. Either I've got my figures wrong, or some CCTV company is making way too much money.
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You missed one statistic. In areas of CCTV, how many crimes has it PREVENTED by just the aspect of them being there.
Unfortunately this is a statistic that is not easy to calculate, unless we employ mind reading.
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You missed one statistic. In areas of CCTV, how many crimes has it PREVENTED by just the aspect of them being there.
Unfortunately this is a statistic that is not easy to calculate, unless we employ mind reading.
Well, the numbers of crimes haven't [bbc.co.uk] gone [bbc.co.uk] down [bbc.co.uk]* significantly - so, essentially, none.
Also, if you look at the percentage of crimes solved, from the link I posted originally [thisislondon.co.uk], you'll see that the crime-clear-up figures are below average, and haven't increased - and are worse in the areas with more CCTV cameras.
Oh, and the police are saying it too [guardian.co.uk].
Does this make me a mind-reader now?
* specifically: "of 24 studies carried out in city centres, only 13 showed crime had fallen since CCTV cameras were inst
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
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What useless rhetoric. Next up, there are some people who are in favor of taxes but still do tax evasion. And some people are in favor of police, but still commit crimes.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Interesting)
I think I know what he was refering to when he was talking about secret gag orders.
Google the "Minton report"
http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/Guardian_still_under_secret_toxic_waste_gag/ [wikileaks.info]
The newspapers were gagged from even reporting that a report about toxic waste dumping existed at all, they were aslo gagged from talking about the gag order.
It's not all conspiracy theory crap.
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Damn. Okay, seems I'll have to take it easy on the seemingly crazy folks today! Maybe I'll even join in.
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It's only "tired out" because you refuse to listen to it. What is wrong with cameras in a public place? As I said above, would you prefer to switch off all logging on a server until after you start having problems? I doubt it. Seriously, what's your problem with having cameras in already very public places?
Would you also pay £200 million for your server logging, when it fails 999/1000 times? [thisislondon.co.uk]
Or if it logs the wrong thing [bigbrotherwatch.org.uk] or perhaps happens to murder the wrong person [thisislondon.co.uk]?
Look at the first link. It's costing TWO MILLION POUNDS to solve ONE CRIME. It costs about £5,000 for the Fuzz to solve a crime. And half of them move around less than a CCTV camera.
It isn't so much the CCTV, but what it is being used for, that the real crimes it records are being ignored, and that it is constantly misused [google.co.uk] due to
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I'll get out the crayons and explain this to you.
Okay, I'm not sure if I can be bothered talking to you if that's the attitude you're going to have. Why bother to provide references at all if you were only going to link half of them and then speak about data from the missing link as if it was in the article you linked to? To then be so condescending about me asking where your figures are coming from is downright .. well I can't quite figure out what it is right now, somewhere between being immature, arrogant, and an arsehole, but you're it.
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Re:Nothing to see here (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. It affects everyone, in a lot more ways than you think. Simple example: visiting any "embarrassing" place (medical facility, sex-shop, late movie, badly rated restaurant or bar...) is perfectly legal, yet I bet most people would behave differently if the footage of a camera at such places entrance was publicly available and/or archived forever, instead of only kept by the owner and for a short time.
More arguments against that stupid "If you have nothing to hide..." line [wired.com]
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What?
there's never any shortage of good counter arguments.
educate yourself.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565 [ssrn.com]
You might be also interested in why it's good that people have a right to remain silent even though obviously (in your world) if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear from telling the truth freely.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4097602514885833865# [google.com]
The CC in CCTV? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know they're not being broadcast over RF but shouldn't making them available to anyone via a website be classed as 'broadcasting' therefore making it Open Circuit TV or just 'TV' ?
Oh goodie (Score:2)
So now everyone with a webcam needs a broadcasting license? Why not demand that everyone writing on the web have a writing license and be done with free speech altogether.
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slow down there buddy. The CCTV vs TV rules are there for your privacy. The idea is that CCTV isn't broadcast so what happens there, stays there (internal security...). If the CCTV, is suddenly broadcast over the internet, you getting caught scratching your ass on camera is now copied to everyone who wants a copy.
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and as an example:
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'A circuit is considered to be closed when electricity flows from an energy source to the desired endpoint of the circuit.'
from here [energyvortex.com]
Sounds great! (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, that's that then (Score:2)
Excuse me. I'm off to stock up on razor blades.
Im suprised they didn't think of this sooner. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't expect this will help either, but it will help the UK citizens think those cameras are there to help keep them safe from criminals.
Re:Im suprised they didn't think of this sooner. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because the "massive CCTV system" is largely a sprawl of private cameras owned and run by businesses to benefit themselves, rather than (even nominally) the public. Publicly owned and run CCTV systems are on a much smaller scale than you might expect.
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Publicly owned and run CCTV systems are on a much smaller scale than you might expect.
But they are practically all connected to the same database which is easily accessible to nearly anyone - as this particularly story demonstrates - and thus magnifies the potential for abuse by many orders of magnitude.
FYI - here are some actual stats on the number of public CCTV cameras in the UK - it is pretty high, starting with nearly 7,500 in London:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8159141.stm [bbc.co.uk]
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That's because the "massive CCTV system" is largely a sprawl of private cameras owned and run by businesses to benefit themselves, rather than (even nominally) the public. Publicly owned and run CCTV systems are on a much smaller scale than you might expect.
10,000 cameras for £200 million [thisislondon.co.uk] is a small scale operation?
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This is not one network of cameras ...
This is a large number of independent sets of cameras - Each one is mostly one or two outside a shop going to their own recorder in store
Note this also does nt include the council run high street systems ...
Or the ones who did not bother with a grant from the government
Or the in store systems that do not qualify for a grant
Publicly owned and run camera systems are mostly run by local councils and are independent of each other and (outside London) only cover one town cen
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This is not one network of cameras ...
This is a large number of independent sets of cameras - Each one is mostly one or two outside a shop going to their own recorder in store
Note this also does nt include the council run high street systems Or the ones who did not bother with a grant from the government Or the in store systems that do not qualify for a grant ...
Publicly owned and run camera systems are mostly run by local councils and are independent of each other and (outside London) only cover one town centre ....
No it's not. Those are NOT included. Read the article again. This is *PURELY* Government CCTV.
Right at the bottom of the article you didn't read [thisislondon.co.uk]: "The true number, once privately run units and CCTV at rail and London Underground stations are taken into account, will be significantly higher."
Trying it out (Score:5, Informative)
It's only 2 pounds a month so I tried it out. Here's the slashdot review summary..
- You have the choice between 1 camera, 2x1 camera and 1x2 cameras.
- You don't get to choose which camera however you can click to choose another random camera.
- You get to click to watch for another 5 minutes on the same camera
- If you don't click you will switch to a different camera automatically
- You get 5 alerts a month.
- There is some kind of buffering going on here however the video footage seems to be very close to live. The camera has a clock in it which matched my desktop to the minute.
- You don't have to be in England to use it. I'm currently half way around the world so it takes a long time for video to show up
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It's only 2 pounds a month so I tried it out.
Aren't they paying you to watch?
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I don't think you can ever make money off this. The only reason I paid was to try it out for myself and see what they were doing. Already unsubscribed the recurred billing.
First you need to have alerted correctly more times then anyone else. Second you only get 5 alerts a month. A combination of this means you'll never get any real money.
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I don't think you can ever make money off this. The only reason I paid was to try it out for myself and see what they were doing. Already unsubscribed the recurred billing.
First you need to have alerted correctly more times then anyone else. Second you only get 5 alerts a month. A combination of this means you'll never get any real money.
Being cheap, eh? Have a competition between many watchers and pay only 1000 quid
Another advantage they can derive: since one is already involved in surveillance, is less likely the one will oppose more advanced surveillance schemes. Except, probably, if disappointment for not being paid kicks in.
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So it's like chatroulette with fewer penises?
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Yes, exactly.
All the cameras I have see are from private shop which leads me to suspect that this is an opt in thing separate from the government CCTV cameras in the streets.
Re:Trying it out (Score:4, Informative)
Some extra details since I posted.
The alerts seem to be going up. I have 6 now so I guess I was wrong and they go up with usage or something.
They're using RTMP (Not RTMPS) for streaming the content and JWplayer. Their site kinda sucks to be honest, a lot of it is unsecured (security by obscurity) and I'm pretty sure you could look at this content without a need to login first if someone gave you the details to do so.
The prize of 1000 pounds is for only one person a month, so if you report 10 crimes and someone else reports 11, sucks to be you.
oh look, it's Tory time! (Score:2, Troll)
Expect policing to be farmed out to private enterprise... oh look, just announced...
Prison to be farmed out to private enterprise... and turned into compulsory labour for that enterprise... oh look, announced at the Tory conference yesterday...
Healthcare rationing to be turned into GPs buying from competing healthcare private enterprise, because goddammit the free market guarantees not just any laparoscopic cholecystectomy but the best profit-making laparoscopic cholecystectomy... oh look, announced a few
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Yes, and then Labour can come back into power, run up a massive debt, fuck things up just as much - but more subtly than the Tories so it takes longer for people to notice - while pretending to give a shit about poor people.
Same shit, different colour.
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New Tory did it out of self-interest (and everyone who mattered, noticed the effect). Old Tory do it out of principle (and no-one who notices, matters).
When the choice is between two similar evils, always choose the man who doesn't have a queer conviction that he's doing it for your own good.
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They are all as bad as each other ....
Labour was ~: Nationalise everything, tax high but give a lot of services
Tory was ~ Privatise everything, tax low but give as few services as possible
New Labour was ~ Privatise some Nationalise some, tax high but give a lot of services
New Tory/Lib Dem is ~ Privatise everything, tax high ("It's Labours fault") and cut services
How do you define "misuse"? (Score:2)
I would say it is already misuse. In this case, it is the misuse of government power. To be fair, the British have always had a problem with this. Their history is filled with stories of oppressive leaders controlling through brute force and unfair law. Now this might be a tainted view, but it's all I have to go on and it seems to fit well with what is going on in the British empire now.
Orwell-tastic (Score:2)
Give it a week... (Score:4, Insightful)
... and they'll be shut down, just like the last bunch that pulled this scam. Loads of people will sign up and lose their money. Six months down the line, we'll see more of timmeh's hysterical squealing about how evil Britain is, as the scammers start up again.
Yes, there's a law against this sort of thing.
Problem-Reaction-Solution (Score:2, Interesting)
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The brits are using a time-proven formula to make their citizens demand previously unpopular policies. It's called Problem-Reaction-Solution. Once a problem is allowed to get bad enough (say, crime) there will be a reaction from the enraged populace, and they will eagerly embrace the solution (say, snitching) offered by the people who engineered the problem to begin with. Governments do it again and again because the public falls for it every time.
Hmmm... If it turns out to be a scheme to squeeze 2 pounds a month for the "privilege of peeping" (you might get to snitch, if lucky enough to see something suspicious) and pay 1000 only for the "snitch-of-the-month-winner", I wonder if they are not actually considering the cost of running the CCTV network the actual problem and "peeping" as the kick meant to provoke the reaction??
Big Brother (TM)? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow - the ultimate reality tv: really watch reality, on tv! I don't know if this is funny or just sad.
Oath of Fealty (Score:2)
guess we might actually get there one day, I wonder how long before someone builds a Todos Santos and how long the line for admission will be.
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Fealty_(novel) [wikipedia.org]
"The arcology dwellers have evolved a different culture, sacrificing privacy - there are cameras (not routinely monitored) even in the private apartments - in exchange for security."
New? (Score:5, Informative)
It's been online for at least a year and was posted by timothy [slashdot.org] almost exactly a year ago.
Also they don't pay you to watch, you pay them to watch and if you happen to see something happening, you might get paid.
Good work, editors.
Re:You know theres something wrong... (Score:5, Funny)
I wish there was a US version.
Give it time. There'll be a vastly inferior US remake soon enough, that will still make a lot more money and be more popular, while purists will prefer the original British version.
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On the plus side you'll be able to pay $2 to skip the ads...
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But seriously....I wish there was a US version.
There is, it's called neighborhood watch and CoP(citizens on patrol). Both are used in Canada and the US. But expect it to increase as cities, towns, and counties continue to cut their police budgets these days.
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Clearly they have or they wouldn't be asking the public to watch for them. This is not an invasion of privacy, the cameras are in public places. This is only "Orwellian" in your own head, because you have to take everything to ludicrous extremes rather than accepting that in reality, schemes like this are positive for society. The only problem would be if they started putting cameras in houses, but nobody has actually done that before, and nobody in their right mind would even try it in a democracy.
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... in reality, schemes like this are positive for society. The only problem would be if they started putting cameras in houses, but nobody has actually done that before, and nobody in their right mind would even try it in a democracy.
Why wouldn't the rhetoric that cameras in public places help prevent and prosecute crime not easily transfer over to "private" places? I would expect that most abuse and a fare share of murders occur in private places. Think of how many murders could be solved (and prevented) if we had cameras in houses. We would completely get rid of meth labs. Obviously the only people who wouldn't want a camera in their house are the ones who want to continue doing these illegal activities. Why should I get to commit cri
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It's not about fear, it's about taking reasonable measures. You're already in public so it's fine to be recorded, it makes sense to record. You're more likely to be assaulted by someone you don't know in public, and cameras are better than nothing for identifying those people. If we had a proper network of public cameras you could establish who went into who's house and came out in a bag, or didn't come out at all, etc anyway.
Obviously most people don't want other people watching them having showers and/or
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Clearly they have or they wouldn't be asking the public to watch for them. This is not an invasion of privacy, the cameras are in public places
I'm SO sick of this false argument about "it's already public!". Just to make it clear, so even you can understand it: when I walk in public, yes, you can see me, but in order to see me, you need to be NEAR ME. Which is OK. Now, with CCTV, you do NOT to be NEAR ME. Thus, the number of eyes that can see me walking in public explodes. Al-right? There is a difference between "public" and "tv show stage".
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon_(satellite) [wikipedia.org]
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The kind that enter a city, get called in and are not able to be made safe.
Now the UK likes the OCR to track any car's id from street to street or via helicopters, (drones?) ect.
Add in computer tracking at home, voice prints if you use a cell phone.. it completes the total surveillance package built on the old phone based systems via the early sat/tower 24/7 intercepts.
Further ba
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Get a bit of encryption key for Windows installed or some hardware ~ 'set top' box with hardware encryption next to the PC.
Once its all in, a set number of hours stream in and the $$$ builds up for the 'share holders'.
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