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Dressing for the surveillance age: Is there anything fashion can do to counter the erosion of public anonymity?

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  1. JXM
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    This jumped out at me. For all of the security cameras out there, do people actually feel any safer? I know that if I was on a train platform late at night in NYC by myself and some random person...

    As I rode the subway from Brooklyn to Penn Station, and then boarded Amtrak for my trip south, I counted the CCTV cameras; at least twenty-six caught me going and returning.

    This jumped out at me. For all of the security cameras out there, do people actually feel any safer? I know that if I was on a train platform late at night in NYC by myself and some random person walked up to me, I wouldn't feel any safer knowing there was a security camera watching.

    Does all this surveillance actually lower crime levels? (I'm not begging the question here - I'm genuinely asking, since I can't recall seeing any stats to that effect)

    Computers can now look for abnormalities in a CT scan as effectively as the best radiologists. Underwater C.V. can autonomously monitor fishery populations, a task that humans do less reliably and more slowly. Heineken uses C.V. to inspect eighty thousand bottles an hour produced by its facility in Franceā€”an extremely boring quality-control task previously performed by people.

    These are the kinds of things that I'm hoping advances in computer vision and learning will be used for, not mass surveillance of people.

    Scientists have been saying for a while now that when it comes to recognizing individual humans, algorithms are horribly biased against non-white people. Hopefully the trend of police departments using facial recognition software starts to reverse over the next few years. No one should end up in jail simply because a computer said they should.

    3 votes