How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance
Thread
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
Grombobulous · · focus · HN ↗
Look, I’m not trying to be pro-surveillance state or whatever, but in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building) in a publicly accessible space on a private university unusual or alarming?
I thought every university had this, but I guess I’m now learning that my university wasn’t prestigious enough to be exempted from reality.
My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
Keep in mind that pretty much 100% of schools this size have assaults take place every single year on school grounds, in a country where school shootings happen on a literal weekly basis.
Speaking of the supposed cost waste of these cameras: I would be surprised the university can get reasonably priced insurance without them.
Edit: this comment has picked up a lot of attention. I encourage those who are disagreeing with me to go directly to the university’s FAQ on the subject that is linked in the article. They directly state that this surveillance system isn’t new, it merely has some new cameras added to the existing system, audio isn’t recorded, facial recognition isn’t used, AI isn’t used, budget from other programs wasn’t sacrificed to add cameras, and data is stored inside an MIT data center. That’s one reason why I hold skepticism about the objectivity of the authors. I thought the authors were not very generous to the school’s willingness to clarify, and based on that FAQ a lot of accusations/assumptions in the article and discussion seem to be false.
<a href="https://evpt.mit.edu/campus-security-cameras-frequently-asked-questions" rel="nofollow">https://evpt.mit.edu/campus-security-cameras-frequently-aske...
kelnos · · focus · HN ↗
Kinda sounds like you are, though.
> but in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building)
The article notes 6-7 cameras per floor of one particular building. I'm not sure of the size of each floor of that particular building, so 6-7 cameras per floor may cover very little space, or it may cover a lot. That also says nothing about the coverage in other buildings. Larger buildings probably got more cameras.
Either way, often these sorts of things are set up in phases, with higher concentrations of cameras added later, after the system proves itself as useful.
> My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
There's a big difference between your bog-standard security camera that just records footage to a hard drive somewhere, and these cameras, that send live feeds to an AI company, where the video is presumably automatically analyzed and indexed to allow administrators to effortlessly track people's movements. The AI company may (now or in the future) offer real-time alerts of "suspicious activity", which as we all should know by now probably will have a significant false-positive rate. (But cops will treat alerts as gospel without doing any critical thinking.)
Grombobulous · · focus · HN ↗
For example, why would I assume that MIT is going to violate Massachusetts law and record audio? The cameras possessing microphone hardware is irrelevant if the software doesn’t turn on audio recording.
MIT clearly states in the FAQ linked in the article that audio isn’t recorded:
> No. The security cameras do not record audio. Massachusetts law prohibits recording audio without the knowledge of those being recorded. Additionally, we do not use facial recognition technology with our security cameras.
As you alluded to, 6-7 cameras per floor might be a lot or might not be. I would think it’s not that many: you’re probably getting two to cover stairwells, one for the elevator, one or two to cover a corridor. As soon as a corridor has a bend or runs a certain distance you’re getting another camera. We’re basically at 4 cameras per floor minimum for the smallest multi-story building possible.
mccoyb · · focus · HN ↗
user2722 · · focus · HN ↗
If the capability is there, it will be used, specially since the whole decision process appears to have been rather opaque.
sterlind · · focus · HN ↗
could you read lips with AI?