Surveillance And Privacy Concerns: Finding A Balance

Mohd Ishaq Shah ✉

In the rapidly evolving age of technological advancement and instant communication, surveillance has become almost unavoidable. Humanity finds itself in a situation where maintaining complete privacy is nearly impossible, particularly with the widespread use of modern technology, including social media apps that request permission to record audio and video interactions before installation, as well as surveillance in workplaces and other establishments.

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Despite this, technological security plays a crucial role in a nation's defence mechanisms in the current context. However, this increased surveillance has also encroached upon individuals' private lives and liberties. Surveillance involves monitoring behaviour, activities, or information for purposes of information gathering, influencing, managing, or directing. This can encompass distant observation using electronic devices like closed-circuit television (CCTV) or intercepting electronically transmitted data such as Internet traffic. It may also involve basic techniques like human intelligence gathering and intercepting postal communications.

Citizens use surveillance to safeguard their neighbourhood while governments extensively utilize it for intelligence gathering, crime prevention, protecting individuals or assets, and investigating criminal activities. Criminal organizations employ surveillance for planning and executing crimes, and businesses use it to gather intelligence on competitors, suppliers, or customers. Religious groups tasked with identifying heresy and dissent may also conduct surveillance, and auditors engage in a form of surveillance.

A consequence of surveillance is its potential to infringe unjustly on individuals' privacy, leading to criticism from civil liberties advocates. Democracies often enact laws to limit both governmental and private surveillance, whereas authoritarian regimes typically lack domestic restrictions on surveillance practices.

Espionage is inherently covert and usually illegal according to the rules of the target party, while most forms of surveillance are overt and deemed legal or legitimate by state authorities. International espionage appears to be prevalent across various countries.  

   

Surveillance cameras, or security cameras, are video cameras used to observe an area. They are often connected to a recording device or IP network and may be watched by a security guard or law enforcement officer. Cameras and recording equipment used to be relatively expensive and required human personnel to monitor camera footage, but analysis of footage has been made easier by automated software that organizes digital video footage into a searchable database, and by video analysis software (such as VIRAT and Human ID). The amount of footage is also drastically reduced by motion sensors which record only when motion is detected. With cheaper production techniques, surveillance cameras are simple and inexpensive enough to be used in home security systems, and for everyday surveillance. Video cameras are one of the most common methods of surveillance. 

As of 2016, there are about 350 million surveillance cameras worldwide. About 65% of these cameras are installed in Asia. The growth of CCTV has been slowing in recent years. In 2018, China was reported to have a huge surveillance network of over 170 million CCTV cameras with 400 million new cameras expected to be installed in the next three years, many of which use facial recognition technology.

In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security awards billions of dollars per year in Homeland Security grants for local, state, and federal agencies to install modern video surveillance equipment. For example, the city of Chicago, Illinois, recently used a $5.1 million Homeland Security grant to install an additional 250 surveillance cameras, and connect them to a centralized monitoring center, along with its preexisting network of over 2000 cameras, in a program known as Operation Virtual Shield. Speaking in 2009, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced that Chicago would have a surveillance camera on every street corner by 2016.[44][45] New York City received a $350 million grant towards the development of the Domain Awareness System, which is an interconnected system of sensors including 18,000 CCTV cameras used for continual surveillance of the city by both police officers and artificial intelligence systems. 

In the United Kingdom, the vast majority of video surveillance cameras are not operated by government bodies, but by private individuals or companies, especially to monitor the interiors of shops and businesses. According to 2011 Freedom of Information Act requests, the total number of local government-operated CCTV cameras was around 52,000 over the entirety of the UK The prevalence of video surveillance in the UK is often overstated due to unreliable estimates being requoted; for example, one report in 2002 extrapolated from a tiny sample to estimate the number of cameras in the UK at 4.2 million (of which 500,000 were in Greater London).[51] More reliable estimates put the number of private and local government-operated cameras in the United Kingdom at around 1.85 million in 2011.

As part of China's Golden Shield Project, several U.S. corporations, including IBM, General Electric, and Honeywell, have been working closely with the Chinese government to install millions of surveillance cameras throughout China, along with advanced video analytics and facial recognition software, which will identify and track individuals everywhere they go. They will be connected to a centralized database and monitoring station, which will, upon completion of the project, contain a picture of the face of every person in China: over 1.3 billion people. Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China's "Information Security Technology" office (which is in charge of the project), credits the surveillance systems in the United States and the U.K. as the inspiration for what he is doing with the Golden Shield Project. 

                                

AT&T developed a programming language called "Hancock", which can sift through enormous databases of phone call and Internet traffic records, such as the NSA call database, and extract "communities of interest"—groups of people who call each other regularly, or groups that regularly visit certain sites on the Internet. AT&T originally built the system to develop "marketing leads”, but the FBI has regularly requested such information from phone companies such as AT&T without a warrant, and, after using the data, stores all information received in its databases, regardless of whether or not the information was ever useful in an investigation. 

Some people believe that the use of social networking sites is a form of "participatory surveillance", where users of these sites are essentially performing surveillance on themselves, putting detailed personal information on public websites where it can be viewed by corporations and government.

So, the matter of concern is that the personal privacy of an individual is no longer his own, but it goes public and is easily leaked out and misused by scrupulous elements/ fraudsters/ hackers etc. Hence the person falling prey to this data hacking is ruined within seconds. So, as personal relationships like legal couples etc come to the exposition there are cent/cent chances of a secret and private communication between husband and wife which however doesn’t remain safe and such communication if leaked out can’t be disastrously shameful for the said couple. Not only this but many more are involved in illegal affairs / extramarital affairs so and so. 

When such information gets; leaked out by any means or as if required by law enforcement agencies, it has a high chance of being misused by the third agencies having direct or indirect access to such data and the persons involved in such activities are easily blackmailed especially men by women and women by men. It is a sheer injustice to the individuals as their personal life and liberty rights are violated here plus in case of illegal matters such incidents lead to suicides and murders etc.

There is a dire need to navigate the way out of this petty and tormenting sort of situation so that personal information is not accessed by anyone without the prior permission of the individuals concerned. The safest way to be safe from such hazardous things is to lemmatize the use of modern technology only for official and commercial use. And let not the personal activities be exposed via such tech-machines. Controlling our behaviour while communicating with our loved ones can be the most effective way to be safe. On legal grounds, any type of such information may not be accessed without the permission of the concerned individual. When the person involved in such immoral or criminal activity is summoned the information be shown to him/her for confirmation and getting his signs over a legal document and recording it confidentially and be deleted from the search engine .