Those silly Brits
So any of you out there who have been paying attention to the other side of ‘The Pond’ know that England is awash in CCTV cameras, watching millions of people all the time. What you may not know is that those cameras, which were purchased and installed by the Government in an effort to abate crime, well, it turns out those cameras are hardly ever watched.
At all. Over 4 million of the little buggers, and only one in a thousand or so actually gets watched in any meaningful way. So, what’s a country to do with all this built-in surveillance?
Why, they should launch a Reality-TV spinoff out of it, of course!
Internet Eyes is the brainchild of three gents who want the people who run the cameras to pay £20 a month to have those cameras uploaded to a game server. Game players will then log in and watch the CCTV feeds, hoping to spot a crime in progress. If they see one, they then report it and the operator of the camera can investigate. Players who help catch the most criminals each month will win cash prizes up to £1,000.
So the first question that comes to my mind (which was also mentioned in the article): what’s to stop criminals from signing up as players, and using all of that juicy surveillance footage to case out a target?
“Oi, look! That’s old Bisby’s store on the feed! There’s the man ‘imself, too! Wait, what’s this? He’s pulling a painting off the wall…and look! There’s ‘is safe!”
Brilliant!
Hollerings