Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.

These systems aren’t integrated into larger systems to help track and ID people.

That said, some of this could change if many shops go to nest or ring solutions... but most shop owners will not keep video footage indefinitely in the cloud as it’d be cost prohibitive.

But I think it also has to do with the fact that at least with him people actually have someone to be mad about. As opposed to their usual mode of surveillance where they are being filmed by a 'security' camera (hey, it's security people! nevermind if it doesn't actually make anything any safer) operated and owned probably by their boss or someone who they are not on equal grounds with.

It makes me kind of sad.

So what's the deal with the selfie obsession and the instagram obsession and so on? Is it that people dislike being watched live? Or is it that people dislike other people having control of the footage?

That said, the reason people get depressed by platforms like instagram is that they don't show real life but a photo-shopped, re-touched, carefully-curated version of life. People only see what others allow them to see.

Furthermore, I know that most of the footage taken by a surveillance camera is discarded. Most of the footage filmed by humans is created for a specific purpose and will be used. Someone else will likely watch it.

Finally, if I walk into a grocery store with a camera, I am going into someone else's establishment informed. If someone walks into a classroom and films me (like in the "Surveillance Camera Man" videos), there was no such agreement, implicit or otherwise.

I really do hate being watched, and hate others taking video. I hope surveillance cameras go out of use, and people stop recording everything on phones. However, there is a difference between that and some silly two-bit social network.

in the old days we'd have God watching over our conscience.

now we have cctv.

Funny how some people choose to react when the concept of 'God' is dropped into a response, irrespective of the author's belief or sincerity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I can understand less and less how other programmers can do this kind of work.

Everyone got to put food on the table, but if the money comes from destroying personal freedom, I could not sleep at night and I would take any other job.

I certainly can't.

I'm also entirely fine with this.

Backdoors in cheap CCTV being accessed illicitly at a mass-level is an entirely different problem, and one which I'd agree would need questioning.

I doubt there's much value in that concern for another decade, until the majority of CCTV cameras are ultra high resolution/30+fps, which they're not.

Yes, there are possible exfil paths, but not ones that can reasonably be executed on a large scale. Realistically, the danger from break-in and hard drive theft (or warrant/subpoena) is greater for the average user.

Unless you believe governments have backdoored SSH, I would say it's good. Definitely not a turnkey solution though.