Watchers

Not sure this is a disguised camera, but it might be.

I think about this when wandering about Walking San Francisco. Home surveillance cameras like Amazon's Ring are certainly picking up my perambulations around city neighborhoods. Who is that person with the camera (on the street I am often not accurately identified by gender) who goes by looking at houses intently? I take seriously the concerns of privacy advocates.

The cameras, they say, intrude on other people’s privacy by recording motion detected up to 30 feet away. The rights of passersby such as dog walkers, mail carriers, and children playing across the street are being violated without their consent, said Mike Katz-Lacabe, a member of Oakland Privacy, a coalition of people who are concerned about privacy and surveillance.

“Personally, I don’t want to live in a surveillance dystopia where my neighbors are essentially spying on me on behalf of my local law enforcement,” he said. ...

[Evan] Greer, [director of Fight for the Future,] said ... “I think it’s very Silicon Valley to assume we can either have a world with package theft, or we can live in a totalitarian surveillance state — but you can’t do both,” she said. “Given the choice, I’d rather live in a world with a little bit of package theft and a little less fascism.”

San Francisco Chronicle

Now I'm not bothering anyone or even approaching any doors. I might photograph your door as I walk by, if you've painted it in interesting colors or hung something novel off it. San Franciscans do the darndest things to express their individuality in their house exteriors, even in neighborhoods where the underlying architecture is mundane.

Other examinations of the proliferation of private-residence, cloud-enabled security cameras raise other concerns. Apparently Amazon's video cache of Ring observations has been hacked. And just having the cameras has trained their owners to be voyeurs.

The Washington Post surveyed more than 50 owners of in-home and outdoor camera systems across the United States about how the recording devices had reshaped their daily lives. Most of those who responded to online solicitations about their camera use said they had bought the cameras to check on package deliveries and their pets, and many talked glowingly about what they got in return: security, entertainment, peace of mind. Some said they worried about hackers, snoops or spies.

But in the unscientific survey, most people also replied that they were fine with intimate new levels of surveillance — as long as they were the ones who got to watch. ...

Matthew Guariglia, an analyst for the online-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, [commented:] “Who hasn’t looked out and watched other people through their peephole? There’s a kind of morbid fascination to it,” he said. “The problem is when it’s not just you behind a peephole but a camera that’s on at all times, saving to a cloud you don’t control.”

We're losing privacy most everywhere and we don't usually even think of it. We all carry underlying, mostly unconscious, daily fears; we wish we were protected. And you just know that the downsides of all this surveillance will be felt most heavily where they always are, where people are least empowered to talk back to the watchers -- in poor communities and in communities of color.