Bloomberg News reports another seeming victory for sousveillance, or the attempt by private citizens to strike back against widespread surveillance: A hacker group has boasted of gaining access to live feeds from 150,000 cameras — at corporate workplaces, hospitals, police stations, prisons and schools — collected by the Silicon Valley start-up Verkada Inc.
The victory is bittersweet, though. In modern society, the legal concept of a reasonable expectation of privacy is increasingly meaningless. Instead, the reasonable expectation is that of zero privacy, and that expectation may already be affecting our public behavior in insidious ways.
According to a 2020 study by the tech research firm Comparitech, some 770 million public cameras operate globally, and even though 54% of them are in China, that leaves plenty for the rest of the world. Then there are the non-public ones, of the kind that Verkada operates at various facilities, and those that people install to secure their homes.