Body cameras zooming in on us
The eyes are the window of the soul but, increasingly, when you encounter someone you’d be wise to look elsewhere around the body for a window to a recording device. Nothing so overt as the smartphones so readily whipped out and pointed at you. We’re talking about teeny little lenses attached to on-body cameras.
Professional use of these is growing apace. This week we learn that as Department of Conservation staff react to the ‘‘worst season ever’’ for staff intimidation, some are wearing body cameras.
Police, prison and fisheries officers have sported them, hospital security guards up Auckland way have been kitted out and some local bodies have been providing them for parking wardens and animal control officers.
Wellington SPCA inspectors have been given the capacity to capture various types of animalistic behaviour for the record. The call has even gone out for stop-go road workers to get them.
Then we add the private users. Like drivers affix dashcams to their cars, recreational cyclists are wearing cameras too.
The case for these cameras is they enhance transparency and accountability, resolving conflicted accounts, potentially providing evidence that might prove – or disprove – misconduct allegations. And, as we keep hearing, recordings are such a good tool for training.
Whereas opponents say the the cameras, once detected or suspected, can be provocations in themselves. When already het-up people realise they’re being filmed it can escalate rather than moderate the climate of conflict, making the cameras more a stress than a support for employees required to wear them.
Concerns, too, about what might happen to the footage, perhaps increasing the risk that victims and witnesses are accidentally or deliberately given unwelcome, or even damagingly exposure.
Short of restrictive legislation that the public hasn’t been conspicuously calling for, these devices, or their ever-improving replacements, will factor more and more in our encounters with others.
We might tell ourselves that, in the wider scheme of things, body cameras are pretty basic devices and a small part of the much wider issue of the expanding reach of information-capture into our lives. Nevertheless, we’re unwise to behold their increasing use blankly.
Professional users will need to be held particularly accountable for the way this information is stored and used. But protections must be wider than that. We’re potentially being watched not only by Big Brother, but also by just about any individual we come across, however reckless they may prove to be.
And consider this: how long before parents are snipping some teeny tiny device to their children’s clothing, just to look back on any encounters that may have happened in their absence? Now there’s a thought that might simultaneously appeal and appal.
Underpinning much of our existing law you’ll find the phrase ‘‘reasonable expectation of privacy’’. The way so much of modern life is headed, we need to be very clear among ourselves what those expectations still are, how achievable they still are, and what we’re prepared to do to maintain them.
We’re potentially being watched not only by Big Brother, but also by just about any individual we come across, however reckless they may prove to be.