Security Cameras Make Us Feel Safe, but Are They Worth the Invasion?

Alana Saulnier, a professor of sociology and a criminologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, suggested looking at it this way: A person committing a home burglary is more likely to be conscious of a surveillance camera than two people fighting outside a nightclub.

“A camera probably isn’t going to be a deterrent to someone who is not going to be thinking rationally, if they were willing to be going through that kind of violence in the first place,” she said. “That’s why it could be useful in some contexts and less useful in other contexts.”

So a security camera could act as a somewhat useful deterrent if your main goal is to prevent property crime, like break-ins and porch thefts. But if your goal is to keep yourself safe in a neighborhood with violent crime, it probably won’t help much. (It might, however, help the police investigate a crime.)

If you’re worried that the police might gain access to your camera without your permission, there are ways to navigate those concerns, like using an offline camera that records to a physical storage drive or a picture card in your home, said Chris Gilliard, a community college professor who has been an outspoken critic of surveillance technologies.

“There’s a stark difference between putting yourself and your community in the Amazon web, and having cameras where you fully control the footage,” he said.

In addition, you can avoid using cameras to monitor indoor spaces like bedrooms, and you can disable their microphones.

As for me, I am more concerned about how quickly our tech could change than I am about the deer munching on my flowers. I’ll plug my camera in when I leave the house for longer stints, like when I go on vacation. The rest of the time, though, I’ll keep it unplugged, sitting on my window sill as a visual deterrent for porch pirates but not offering the police anything to snoop on.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/technology/personaltech/security-cameras-surveillance-privacy.html