Body Camera Giant Wants Police To Collect Your Videos Too (fastcompany.com)

tedlistens shares a report from Fast Company: Axon, the police supplier formerly known as Taser and now a leading maker of police body cameras, has also charged into police software with a service that allows police to manage and eventually analyze increasingly large caches of video, like a Dropbox for cops. Now it wants to add the public's video to the mix. An online tool called Citizen, set to launch later this year, will allow police to solicit the public for photos or video in the aftermath of suspected crimes and ingest them into Axon's online data platform. Todd Basche, Axon's executive vice president for worldwide products, said the tool was designed after the company conducted surveys of police customers and the public and found that potentially valuable evidence was not being collected. "They all pointed us to the need to collect evidence that's out there in the community."

[But] systems like Citizen still raise new privacy and policy questions, and could test the limits of already brittle police-community relations. Would Citizen, for instance, also be useful for gathering civilian evidence of incidents of police misconduct or brutality? [And how would ingesting citizen video into online police databases, like Axon's Evidence.com, allow police to mine it later for suspicious activity, in a sort of dragnet fashion?] "It all depends," says one observer, "on how agencies use the tool."

Comments

Should be an easy way to submit dash cam video.

[gfxguy]

I catch at least two or three or more people doing the absolute dumbest, unsafe things on my dash cam every week. The only reason I even got it was because someone turned left from a center lane and hit my car (going straight, in a straight lane) and then denied they were trying to turn to the police, making me liable for my deduction.

So I'm not talking about people speeding or on their phones or anything, I'm talking about people using turn lanes to pass people and not even slowing down to make right turns on red in front of on-coming traffic. I actually am looking forward to the days of either 100% self driving cars, or everybody having dash cams.

Security and planting evidence

[teasea]

I'm wondering how they would secure against altered video that implicates the innocent or exonerates the guilty if they are not pulling the video directly from the source. It would break the chain of custody for the evidence. Even if only used in the investigation, the ease with which that investigation could be led off track makes me leery. That and the company proposing it.

Asymmetry == abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

> I see only a tiny risk to privacy,

Hard to see much of anything when you deliberate keep your eyes closed.

Its bad enough that the cops have full access to all the bodycam videos while the people recorded on the videos do not. That's an asymmetry that is guaranteed to result in abuse. For example, a cop with stalker tendencies sees a pretty girl during the course of his duties. Goes back, runs facial recog on her image recorded on his bodycam. Then he searches all the other naively submitted public videos looking for clues as to her identity, residence, marital status, etc. That kind of abuse will be just the tip of the iceberg.

Sure, could try to argue that these databases only make it easier to do what could already have been done. But that's no defense at all, if its easier to use these databases to catch criminals its going to be easier to abuse the info too because the tech is neutral as to purpose, it can't tell the difference between stalking and a legitimate investigation.