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SECURITY CAMERAS

ARE WE BEING WATCHED ?

We rarely look up at the estimated 1.85 million CCTV cameras in the UK. Neither do we notice the Bodycams increasingly adopted by police or the growing numbers of Dashcams appearing in cars.

With an average of one CCTV camera for every 34 people these items have become ubiquitous. 52,000 are known to be used by local government and 3,000 belong to the Highways Agency who use them to monitor major roads. This, however, leaves a majority in the control of private individuals, companies, and other organisations who continually scan homes, shops, businesses and other public spaces.

Many of these systems are now supplied with facial recognition technology and AI is increasingly being deployed across the public sector. However, Tony Porter the surveillance camera commissioner says “There is insufficient guidance to public bodies to know what is appropriate and what is not, and the public have no idea what is going on because there is no real transparency.”

HISTORY

The first CCTV system was installed by Siemens in Germany in 1942, to observe the launch of V2 rockets.The first commercial closed-circuit television system was marketed by Vericon In the U.S. in 1949. Then in September 1968, Olean New York was the first city in the United States to install video cameras in an effort to fight crime. The first use by local government in the UK was in Kings Lynn, Norfolk, in 1987.