Lick Your Lips and Smile
Sparxafire!
Inevitibly, as technology progresses, surveillance cameras are popping up everywhere to protect public safety. And inevitibly, we have to listen to the finger-shaking ire of conservative people who just don’t like it, by cracky! They try to make the case that, as one moves around and about town, one is anonymous, and a video record of one’s movements to the grocery store and the bank and the beauty shop is a severe invasion of privacy. Sigh.
These are, of course, the same people who found the invention of electricity to be suspect and unnatural.
Of course, I think the main value of camera-ing up will be that we will always have footage to run endlessly on TV when a crisis occurs. We even have accidental footage of the I-35W bridge collapsing in Minneapolis, thanks to somebody’s nearby surveillance camera. And, I think the video captures will be a big help to law enforcement to catch perpetrators of crimes after the fact… many of these systems can zoom in on faces and license plate numbers.
But prevention? Not so much. I don’t know how many cameras are in my neighborhood, but the probability of being tracked on camera on my way to the beauty shop has caused me to change my behavior. I no longer dare to pick my nose at stoplights.
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