Showing posts with label sousveillance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sousveillance. Show all posts

05 September 2008

Open Source Surveillance

True open source surveillance does exist. It's called sousveillance, and uses the idea of distributing the task among many people, often in response to centralised surveillance. It's an interesting idea, especially in the context of a society like the UK's, where we are constantly spied on by CCTV cameras.

Alas, that's not quite what we talking about here....

On Open Enterprise blog.

01 November 2007

Crowdsourcing Sousveillance (Again)

I can't help feeling this will ultimately link with the story about wireless memory cards:

Software that turns groups of ordinary camera cellphones into a "smart" surveillance network has been developed by Swiss researchers. The team says it will release the software for programmers and users to experiment with.

Not least because:

The researchers plan to release Facet as an open-source project, allowing anyone to use or modify its code, and to experiment with networked camera phones running the software. "Because of the way we implemented it, the whole thing will run in Java on virtually any phone you want," Bolliger says. "It will be very nice to see what people come up with."

(Via The Inquirer.)

20 June 2007

Crowdsourcing Sousveillance

I wrote recently about Microsoft's amazing Photosynth demo, which shows pictures of Notre-Dame taken from Flickr stitched together automatically to produce a three-dimensional model that you can zoom into in just about any way.

Then I read this:

Madeleine McCann's parents will appeal to Irish tourists to check holiday snaps for clues - while the flat their child was abducted from reportedly sold for half price.

Madeleine's parents Kate McCann, 38, and Gerry, 39, will appear on television to ask anyone who took a trip to Portugal in early May to send photos to British investigators.

It occurred to me that what we really need is a system that can take these holiday snaps and put them together in time to create a four-dimensional model that can be explored by the police - a new kind of crowdsourced sousveillance.

Given that Photosynth is still experimental, we're probably some way off this. I'd also have concerns about handing over all this information to the authorities without better controls on what would be done with it (look what's happening with the UK's DNA database.)

23 May 2007

Privacy Through Openness

Hm, a novel approach:

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."