For years I've thought about doing an "art project" to make people more aware of the fact they are being observed – but I never actually got up and did it.
The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".
I had thought about creating a larger roadside banner with the faces (pulled from voters guide) of the city council members who approved Flock, along with the face of the Sheriff with something along the lines of "These people want to know where your wife and daughter are at all times - deflock.me" and place it right next to the Flock camera.
Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.
I wonder if it’s legal to modify the images to look more sinister. Otherwise, someone passing by might not read the text, making it free advertising for council/sherrif.
Feels like a dishonest approach, to be honest.
The issue is, a lot of people wouldn’t mind the sheriff knowing where their wife and daughter are at all times. What if one of them gets kidnapped? It would be good if law enforcement could track them. That’s the logic some people have …
It's not illogical to say that more cameras would lead to more arrests of kidnappers, and other violent criminals.
I don't think many of us would object to video surveillance actually doing that. So, it's not even an immoral thought to many of us.
The problem is LE using it for almost any other purpose whatsoever.
This would be a potential point of conversation if the research didn't show that more ALPRs doesn't lead to reduced crime or more arrests - except in the very narrow slice of automotive theft.
Not exactly the same, but Massive Attack had some facial recognition software running in the background during a concert to illustrate how pervasive modern day surveillance is: https://petapixel.com/2025/09/17/band-massive-attack-uses-li...
That's not face recognition. That's face detection. It just detects faces and sticks a label from a pre-selected list. Come on, this doesn't even pass the basic smell test. "Facial recognition" my ass. It doesn't recognize anyone. I could build this in a cave with scraps. There's a huge difference between the two: recognition means you have found a known person, detection means you found a person.
That's about the difference between eating sodium chloride and eating sodium.
You're right but I don't understand why you're so hostile about it. At any rate, it's still making the same point regardless.
This kind of privacy slop is overly popular in tech circles. Each participant just posts uninformed garbage and then they link to each other with “citations” for sources that are wholly made up. It’s really reducing the quality of information on this website that it’s now full of junior engineers and interns.
Those guys always obsess over CVEs and privacy and they’re always wrong about everything but have learned to mimic the language of people who know stuff. “There’s some evidence” / “here’s a source”. Ugh. Can’t stand it.
Belgian artist Dries Depoorter has something that comes close, where he tried to match public webcams against Instagram photos. See https://driesdepoorter.be/thefollower .
Years ago there was a YouTuber, "Surveillance Camera Man," who went around pointing a camera at people with no pretense. Frequently the subjects were upset by this and became aggressive, even violent. I believe the intended message was that this is a natural and justified reaction to being surveilled, and yet there is little outcry because public surveillance is largely invisible and/or faceless (e.g. just a CCTV camera mounted on a building, rather than a stranger invading your personal space).
The YouTube account is no longer around, but you can still watch it on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtu...
My take on that is that they're different situations because a CCTV camera has 1000s of hours of footage to scrub through and will likely only be looked at if/when something bad happens. Whereas the guy pointing a camera at me probably only has a couple hours which means I'm likely relevant to the cameraman (ie, I'll go into that final video) whereas I'm not that relevant to the CCTV.
I know more recent cameras are using AI analysis to constantly track and catalog people which is more worrying but the old school surveillance cameras don't bother me as much.
I like the OP's idea for an art project more because it's showing your what is really happening (rather than convincing people that filming someone on a 4k camera is the same as CCTV surveillance) - CCTV cameras are constantly monitoring and many can be publicly accessed.
If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide
I don't even think that is the best defense because it takes a very passive acceptance to it. On the flip side, if someone steal my bike or assaults me in public, I'd like there to be some accountability which would otherwise never happen (and vice versa). In the past, if a white lady were to accuse a black man of some crime, then it was practically impossible to fight it. With CCTV, you can prove innocence and guilt a lot more conclusively.
Don't worry, a random Ring cam will record everything. Hope my neighbor likes keeping track of me checking my mail.
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
"Posting quotes that indicate that you didn't successfully identify sarcasm makes your L even worse"
-Me
"... and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots ..."
This is what "Oh By Codes"[1] are for.
Instead of trying to paint a QR code, which is difficult, you can just chalk a 6 character code.
Further, you can create them on the fly without using a special tool - just a textarea on a simple webpage.
You can encode up to 4096 characters or a single URL redirect.
[1] https://0x.co
But people's phones will scan a QR code from the camera: they're much more likely to do that then type in a URL while walking.
That's certainly true - hence the extremely (almost minimally) short '0x.co' URL.
It's certainly not for every use-case ...
So 0x.co is tinyurl for strings?
Oh By is an “everything shortener”.
Well, it's a lookup table, limited to 6^N, where N is the number of legal characters (printable ASCII?).
They should make a tiny encoded image to save too. Typing something isn't as fast as point and shoot.
You can't scan them like a QR-code, which is kind of the point?
I remember seeing an art project in the UK ~10 years ago where they had actors enact a short film but everything was filmed using street cameras, which IIRC everyone could request access to with little bureaucracy.
found it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceless_(2007_film)
I remember a music video with the same premise: https://youtube.com/watch?v=W2iuZMEEs_A
A better "art project" would be a alpr that detects police and municipal vehicles and reports them to a map criminals and citizens alike can see
What, are those streams publicly accessible?
I'm only aware of boring rooftop weather webcams where obv you can't see yourself.
Any examples for what you speak of?
I don't mean these Flock cameras, I mean what you refer to as "boring rooftop weather webcams". Some of those show people fairly close up and even if you can't recognize your face in the stream, you will recognize the place and realize that it's you, standing there right now in that video stream.
Just search for "<your city> webcam" and see what you can find.
Some places have them available. For example, every highway camera in California (and in some places like Oakland there's plenty of cameras that show crosswalks): https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm
Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.
Many are! I live in NY and 511ny.org has a great view of all traffic cams in the state (and some beyond it, but I don't understand how they got on the list...)
https://trafficcamphotobooth.com/
You can even take a selfie with them!
There's probably several interesting ways to make a QR code on the ground with chalk. I'm thinking of a turtle bot loaded with spray chalk, for starters.
And this post uses wire screen to make a stencil https://www.instructables.com/Simple-QR-Code-Spray-Paint-Ste...
I'd like to start a standard marking of some sort to call them out. A hot pink arrow drawn with spray paint on the pole is the first thing that came to mind.
Could use projectors to display the feed directly onto the ground or a building wall, in some ways that may be more impactful. You'd have to stay with the projector and power source, but easier to move to the next location, and less of a chance of getting in trouble for defacing public property, etc.
I see a meeting tonight in a neighboring city with a council recommendation of approve. Timely
Joke's on you... even most EVs watch everyone and everything that they pass/passes them. Walking through the parking lot ... face recognition.
Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.
…wait, what about 1990?
I don't think it's that year in particular, but lots of spy movies from that era include bits like "Show me the feed from cameras in that area... OK, zoom in on that guy in the black hood... ID him!". In real time.
And then the agents run out of the office and get to that part of the city in a couple minutes, as if they were in Mayberry instead of NYC.
It was a bit of an arbitrary year, but I chose it because that seemed to be a kind of event horizon as the www and internet bubble, aka fraud, would start heating in that period to the crescendo in 99. It was a bit of an early time when previous "conspiracy theorists" of the pre-digital era were starting to pick up on what the government and organizations were doing and saying, largely because they had experiences and connections to people in the government and military; and were starting to "sound the alarm" about thing that digital things would really enable for the first time in human history... the figurative panopticon of surveillance and totalitarianism, which we are arguably already in, and are definitely heading towards, even though it is not apparent to regular people by design. As with the story in 1984, the first order of operations for the Party, was to hide and obscure and obfuscate the creeping and enveloping psychological control that the protagonist was momentarily able to break free of.
Just to put it into perspective, not a single of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day worst regimes of the 20th century were even able to dream about just the depth and breadth of surveillance and control that basically all regimes of the whole west hat already implemented at this point, let alone are actively and aggressively implementing. Sure, they haven't started. murdering people in overt ways, but they have already started doing so on the small scale and covertly.
Those were all things that people were starting to connect the dots about in around the 1990s as networking/www and technology was starting to come into maturity. Arguably, I could have also said the 2000s, but it's only ever gotten worse with every decade, so it seems more relevant to identify a kind of change over, not an incremental evolution.
damn that’s a good idea