Slashdot Mirror
New CCTV Site In UK Pays People To Watch
pyrosine writes "Have you ever felt like being paid for watching live CCTV footage? The BBC are reporting CCTV site, 'Internet Eyes' is doing exactly that. Offering up to £1000 to people who report suspicious activity, the scheme seems an easy way to make money. Not everyone is pleased with the scheme though; the Information Commissioner's Office is worried it will lead to voyeurism or misuse, but what difference does it make when you can find said webcams with a simple Google search?"
Cue the stupid people in the UK who will say the tired out line "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." Strangely the phrase does not apply when people like politicians, footballers and the film / record industry have something to hide, who run to the courts for crooked "Super Injunctions" to protect their criminal behaviour / scandals from being made public.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I always thought the CC in CCTV stood for 'Closed Circuit', meaning the pictures are not being broadcast.
I know they're not being broadcast over RF but shouldn't making them available to anyone via a website be classed as 'broadcasting' therefore making it Open Circuit TV or just 'TV' ?
I don't feel threatened by surveillance cameras in public places at all, indeed, I feel safer knowing that if someone does pull some shit, there's at least a possibility that there'll be some footage of it...
Once the surveillance gets into our homes and private work spaces and whatnot, then that's a problem, and a serious one...
ìì!
I wish there was a US version.
Give it time. There'll be a vastly inferior US remake soon enough, that will still make a lot more money and be more popular, while purists will prefer the original British version.
Looks like most voyeurs will end up paying the company, not the other way around:
http://interneteyes.co.uk/community/index.html
It's £1.99/month or £12.99/year to use the site. To do marginally better than breaking even you'd need to pay annually and watch it for 2 hrs/day, which can get you back £1.50/month, but the only large payment mentioned explicity is £1000 for 'the Viewer who receives the most award points'. More like a paid-entry competition than a job.
By linking to their site from here you just violated their "no linking" policy found here: http://interneteyes.co.uk/terms-conditions.html
"Linking to our site
You may not link any other site to our website."
Whoops - and now I have as well
I don't expect this will help either, but it will help the UK citizens think those cameras are there to help keep them safe from criminals.
This part is funnier:
You may not use our website, or material available through our website:
[...]
In a way that abuse or invade [sic] another's privacy, [...]
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Most crimes are committed in boardrooms and government. Let's put CCTV there.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
It's only 2 pounds a month so I tried it out. Here's the slashdot review summary..
- You have the choice between 1 camera, 2x1 camera and 1x2 cameras.
- You don't get to choose which camera however you can click to choose another random camera.
- You get to click to watch for another 5 minutes on the same camera
- If you don't click you will switch to a different camera automatically
- You get 5 alerts a month.
- There is some kind of buffering going on here however the video footage seems to be very close to live. The camera has a clock in it which matched my desktop to the minute.
- You don't have to be in England to use it. I'm currently half way around the world so it takes a long time for video to show up
... and they'll be shut down, just like the last bunch that pulled this scam. Loads of people will sign up and lose their money. Six months down the line, we'll see more of timmeh's hysterical squealing about how evil Britain is, as the scammers start up again.
Yes, there's a law against this sort of thing.
Got any more stupid arguments you'd like to trot out as excuses so that nobody can watch you while you're shopping?
Sure, I'll bite.
I think you're forgetting that CCTV is used as evidence, and since it's "unbiased", it must be admissible, and 100% accurate evidence.
Of course, Judges and Police don't often realise that mistakes are often made with CCTV, nor that it's bloody expensive to keep it running, and would be cheaper to employ police instead.
I'd rather get arrested for climbing a wall, than have a mugger or rapist go free because there is no evidence.
That is, until they lock you up thinking you are a mugger/rapist?
That's not just your problem. Then we've got an innocent person in jail, and a mugger/rapist that the police has stopped looking for.
Exactly. If you have nothing to hide, why try and hide your website?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
That is, until they lock you up thinking you are a mugger/rapist? That's not just your problem. Then we've got an innocent person in jail, and a mugger/rapist that the police has stopped looking for.
That seems to be a bit of a strawman considering mistakes are made all the time without CCTV too. With really crappy quality CCTV it isn't that much use as evidence (I should know our CCTV system completely sucks here at work, wish they'd get a decent system), but with high quality stuff it's a lot more useful. A lot of businesses around here run their own CCTV, it isn't costing the government anything. The Police occasionally request some footage of certain times if there's been dodgy goings on on our street (which there often are as we live next to one of the roughest areas in the city).
Of course mistakes are made with other systems, but they don't cost £200 million to solve 10 crimes over ten years.
CCTV was originally called a PREVENTATIVE measure. It hasn't worked. So what happens now? The Government push for more, and more.
I'd prefer that £200 million to pay for the 666 new police officers we could've had for the last ten years, not some childs' plaything.
You don't best stop crime by constantly monitoring people. You best stop crime by trust and education.
It's been online for at least a year and was posted by timothy almost exactly a year ago.
Also they don't pay you to watch, you pay them to watch and if you happen to see something happening, you might get paid.
Good work, editors.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Where in that article does it say they only solved 10 crimes?
That's per year. It's simple mathematics. Says in the article there are 10,000 cameras, It also says that 1 in 1000 crimes are solved by CCTV per year.
It's saying crime has dropped by around 20% in each area.
Where does it say that? It says the clear-up rate for crimes is around 22% - but it generally has always been around that figure - 78% of crimes are unsolved.
It does say underneath "the money spent on cameras would be better used on street lighting, which has been shown to cut crime by up to 20 per cent." - that seems a far better choice to spend money on.
I'm happy with things like putting in better lighting rather than cameras if it's shown to better cut crime levels
Agreed.
(though both is ideal because then you still have a record of the remaining 80% of crimes still happening in the streets).
Doesn't work like that. Installing street lighting would decrease it by 20%. Installing CCTV would decrease it by 0.1%, and probably not further. The two are quite exclusive!
Also, the cost of CCTV (£2000/year) has got to be far greater than installing street lighting.
My main issue with people's arguments here is not about the effectiveness of CCTV anyway, it's frustration at the attitude that they shouldn't be filmed while out in public.
I haven't a problem with being filmed in public, so long as it is used properly. Being checked on occasionally is fine. Being followed around by a CCTV operator with a stalking obsession; or using it to blackmail my non-existent wife - isn't. We don't even know what the controls on CCTV are - but I know someone who is a CCTV operator, and knowing the kind of guy he is, really worried me.
I think it's a great thing to be doing, especially considering for example some of the abuses of Police power going on that we're only able to see now with the popularity of YouTube.
I'd agree if it wasn't for things like the attack on a 50 year old man, coming home from work, recorded on camera, beaten by police from behind; and the police being let off. More details here. It's certainly not the first time CCTV has been ignored - or as others have mentioned, damming evidence on CCTV completely disappearing.
The more people are aware that they are accountable, the better behaved they are.
I've worked for a number of years in schools, and have met a number of drugs users. In schools at least, the less you trust the students, the more trouble they cause. We had a unusual trick of those students being caught 'hacking' (sic), were given more access, and not punished. It worked unbelievably well. It's not necessarily accountability that makes people better behaved, but often is down to education, or a feeling of unfairness in life.
Being constantly watched only helps to promote paranoia to all people, you can see this by the number of people scared of CCTV! I'm sure that common criminals and drug users are far less caring about being caught.
Not only that, but CCTV is crap anyway. Have you ever tried it yourself? Imagine quite how bad it is.
You've seen yourself, the crime figures seem to indicate that CCTV doesn't help anyway, and certainly is costing a lot more money and stopping crime less than it would just to install street lighting.