Honestly, this kind of thing might not exist soon anyway. Lots of cities have started installing their own cameras everywhere. Several argue that the park strip (The small sliver of land between your sidewalk and the road) Is technically city property, so they can put up their own cameras along there anywhere they want. Many have also started mounting them to signs (stop signs, yield signs, street signs that are at every intersection, etc) and telephone or power poles. There have been communities complaining about this recently, and cities and police departments arguing that it is totally legal. Some of them are using the cameras To automatically capture license plates and run then for every single vehicle that drives down the road so they can continually be notified if there is a stolen vehicle, or Amber alert vehicle, or APB, or high-speed Chase or whatever else going on, get an automatic update and tracking for these kinds of situations. Additionally, they can access the footage whenever there is any kind of police report that happens, they can pull up the cameras they installed near that area and see if they have any supporting video of the incident.
Add to that current intent of some places to start having some AI governed drones monitoring certain locations from high up.
Plus all the autonomous “robots” that are pending launch soon which will all have cameras…I guarantee there will be a number of these walking around neighborhoods in place of the traditional “beat cop” that used to walk neighborhoods (in addition to the drones).
I think voluntary submissions for outdoor recordings are something they won’t even care about soon since many cities will likely have their own equipment (cameras or drones, etc). I know that sounds big brother-esque, but I think you’ll be surprised what people get used to accepting as normal.
A couple of decades ago it would’ve been unthinkable to tell people that soon most people would be totally okay with someone like Alexa or Google home speakers listening to and recording every sound and have everything said monitored and reviewed by a foreign quality assurance human. People used to joke about such things with the utmost horror and aversion. Now everyone does it and it’s not abnormal and rarely seen as repulsive. This kind of thing will steadily increase as we are currently seeing with data brokers and AI.
But for now, the voluntary camera registries can be useful.
I’m not necessarily opposed to nearly everything being recorded everywhere. After all, I have over 60 cameras. There was even a period of several years (haven’t done this for many years now) where I carried around a voice recorder that automatically recorded every single sound 24/7 (The battery would last for a month, and be able to record a couple months worth of recordings at a time). I encrypted such backups and rarely to never reviewed anything, but it was there just in case I needed to prove something later (I had some severe PTSD trauma from a horrible liar I was protecting myself against for a while).
However, it was nice to know that only I had access to such things. I didn’t mind everything being recorded or that there be potential accountability for everything, but at the same time I believe in The importance of privacy too. Yes, it would be great if everything was recorded everywhere and people couldn’t get away with crimes, and people could no longer lie. But at the same time, this can have other unexpected negative consequences as well, including potentially somebody weaponizing it unfairly or dishonestly.
IDK, I have mixed feelings is all. For now, I try to keep my stuff local as much as possible, and be a good neighbor and citizen and share things that are really important. That’s been working out pretty well so far.
