Via Boing Boing:
The valuable trend in surveillance, Whiting says, is toward this data-driven analysis (even when much of the job still involves old-fashioned gumshoe work). “It’s the data,” he says, “And cameras now are data. So it’s all data. It’s just learning to understand that data is important.”
One thing I wanted to see in this piece was some reflection on how casino level of surveillance, and the casino theory of justice (we spy on everyone to catch the guilty people) has become the new normal across the world.
Casino panopticon: a look at the CCTV room in the Vegas Aria – Boing Boing
Points:
- “They use a lot of machine intelligence to raise potential cheating to the attention of the operators.”
- “…not looking for specific people, but rather patterns of behavior.”
- “…though facial recognition doesn’t yet work reliably enough to replace human operators, Whiting’s excited at the prospects of OCR. It’s already proven useful for identifying license plates. The next step, he says, is reading cards and automatically assessing a player’s strategy and skill level. In the future, maybe, the cameras will spot card counters and other advantage players without any operator intervention.”
Ponder: As surveillance becomes ever more pervasive, will we begin to redefine what we once considered out-of-bounds behavior in order to protect people’s private worlds? For example, will we demand employers not look unfavorably on job candidates because of photos of embarrassing conduct posted on Facebook?