The author of a new article on surveillance in The Walrus thinks you do. Hal Niedzviecki says that while the thought of being monitored used to disturb us (think George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four), cameras and other surveillance techniques are so prevalent today that we’ve stopped noticing them. And, he says, when we do notice we don’t really care (case in point: when it was announced that 10,000 cameras would be installed in Toronto’s subways, streetcars and buses, he asserts that citizens “shrugged and went about their business”).
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They are, according to one of London’s top police officers. In an interview with The Guardian, Mick Neville, head of New Scotland Yard’s Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office, says that even though Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe, CCTV cameras have, so far, helped solve just three per cent of street robberies in London.
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Day to day, our actions are being captured, and increasingly, it’s being done by surveillance cameras. This technology – like RFID tags – is being used by more organizations everyday to improve security and deter thieves. And while that’s a perfectly legitimate reason to employ cameras, organizations should also be ensuring their surveillance activities minimize the impact on people’s privacy.
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On the second day of the Terra Incognita conference, we had the opportunity to hear about recent innovations in radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs).
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On the second day of our conference, Professor Valerie Steeves spoke about how children interact with popular sites like Webkinz, Neopets and Barbie Girls. We have already provided a brief summary of her presentation and her fellow speakers on the subject, but thought you would like to see her speech. The presentation deck she used for her speech, and to which she refers, is also available online.
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As we mentioned several weeks ago, Michael Chertoff spoke at the opening session of the 29th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners.
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We heard from Peter Fleischer, the Chief Privacy Officer for search company Google, on Friday.
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As we mentioned earlier this week, Professor Michael Geist spoke at the closing session of the Conference. He noted that we already live in a world where surveillance is common place, and our personal data trail crosses borders and oceans and lives in countless databases.
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