The University of Reading is to lead a new €5.3m European Union funded research centre that will examine the social and ethical challenges the surveillance industry faces.
One area the new Centre will examine is the possibility of integrating video analysis and context information to provide privacy-awareness filtering at the camera end, reducing the amount of unnecessary CCTV recording. These cameras can be taught to spot, and in turn record, only people or events of potential interest to organisations such as the police, with the ability to delete irrelevant persons/objects needlessly captured in the image.
This technology would allow both event-spotting-and-alerting as well as recording and transmission, making retrieval of significant images more efficient. This would be particularly helpful when having to examine footage from a huge number of cameras during live situations, such as the recent riots.
The use of video technology in security is a contentious issue with unclear privacy laws. A UK Borough Council recently lost a landmark ruling for using CCTV to spy on the movements of a family to verify they resided in a given school catchment area.
CCTV cameras are an effective tool used by the police to combat crime. However, access to private information about an innocent bystander’s lifestyle that is also captured and may be liberally processed, perhaps for criminal intent, could be construed as dangerous and an assault on their right to privacy. The News of the World’s ‘hacking’ allegations of illegal access to people’s phone messages is a prime example.
Reading and its project partners have established the European Virtual Centre of Excellence for Ethically-guided and Privacy-respecting Video Analytics (VCE VideoSense), the first centre of its type. It brings together leaders in video analytics with the aim of ensuring that ethical and privacy issues are taken into account when developing security video technology, rather than as an after-thought.
Professor Atta Badii, the Director of the new Centre who also leads the Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory at the University of Reading’s School of Systems Engineering said: “The University of Reading and the VideoSense Consortium are delighted to announce the launch of the VCE. Video analytics is a controversial but an important technology. The current phone-hacking controversy has highlighted how vulnerable our privacy is in what is a fast-moving technological world.
“We must ensure that ethical and privacy issues are taken into account so we are afforded both the security protection and privacy respect we deserve, and not one at the expense of the other. With this new European Centre of Excellence, together with world-class research centres in video analytics, privacy law and ethics, we are embarking on a rolling programme of open innovation in socio-ethically responsible technology which shall be ‘privacy preserving’. This will ensure any intrusion on people’s privacy is minimised by design, and not simply assumed to be an inevitable price of national security protection.”
In the meantime organisations should look to installation companies to ensure that CCTV is installed in the most effective manner and protects the privacy of their visitors and neighbours. There are already in place British and European industry standards and codes of practice and reputable companies will have these accreditations and be ready to explain how they adhere to these demanding standards.