It is a known fact that places like airports or sports venues are equipped with hundreds of security cameras which can track and document any and all suspicious activity. You can usually spot them very easily in strategic areas on the ceiling, but now new technology is going to make them harder to recognize or avoid. New types of LED lights are making their way into high-profile venues, and they can do much more than just illuminate and lit the areas: they can track movement, record conversations and basically perform like any security camera currently out there.
The fact each light will be able to act as a security camera means it will be harder for criminals/terrorists to avoid, and will give security personnel much more data to work with. This is a great thing for personal safety, but probably a bad thing for privacy.
What are your thoughts of the new technology? Do you think it's a good advancement, or do you think it has negative ramifications with regards to privacy?
HIGHLY misleading article (not your fault though).
That cbc report was leading us to beleive LED was doing the whole job but it's simply a LED-camera-mic fixture.
Nothing really new here just a new package. although peeping on personnal conversation is a nono. I don't care how many "terrorist" there are, invasion of privacy is invasion of privacy.
1. I think the report is on few different technologies - yeah, one of them is just a normal security camera hidden in LED lights. But they mention motion detectors and other things the lights would be able to do... and that's new to that field.
2. I rather be safe than have a little privacy in high-risk places. What privacy worth if im dead? :)
2) It's reasonable to expect little to no privacy in public higher risk public places. However, the idea that privacy is worth little due to the potential risk of death is a very dangerous slippery slope. You are far more likely to die in a car accident or a lightning strike or choking on your lunch than a random act of violence that a loss of privacy would have been able to prevent.
I can get behing super-high security in airport and stuff but whenthey start to listen to my personnal conversation in parking lots, street corners, etc. No.
I'd quote Benjamin Franklin, ironically.: "Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
It's hilarious than the founding fathers of america said such things and yet the US are the first to spy on innocent citizens for no reason other than prevent POTENTIAL threats (which don't even work...).
And what if people don't like them; are they going to remove them?
Not like they're going to stop at airports, you know...
At this point most people have no expectation of privacy in airports. As far city wide not a great fear of that yet. Not only do you have the cost of this system but the whole infrastructure data storage, sorting and monitoring would be insane on a city wide scale.
Airports and train stations this makes sense but a city the cost would be insane. I live in a city where they had cameras but could not monitor because of costs, they tried volunteers and police cadets. So there was an obvious drop in quality in data gathering.
Building monitoring devices is one thing but the support system is another. To say you will be saving money because of less power needed for LCD lights vs Normal lights is not misleading but stupid.
Ok, great. They made an advance in the devices used to monitor but unless they increase the budget to allow more people to review it or come up with one hell of a computer program (and computer) to view everything, it is nearly meaningless. This won't prevent crime nor stop it in the act. At most we will be able to pull more information after the fact. It's a false sense of security.