The wide array of cameras and technology gathering information about our day-to-day life can be hard to get an overview of, says RNZ's Phil Pennington. Photo: Supplied/ Dan Bailey
Analysis - Artificial intelligence-enabled cameras on billboards, in bus windshields, on petrol station forecourts and in the checkout at the supermarket - all these are here, or about to be.
The selling of surveillance for safety and security's sake has been very successful around the world, and in New Zealand.
It has proceeded apace, with barely a blip - though just this week a legal challenge to it has been playing out in the Auckland District Court, without any coverage by the media.
In that hearing, expected to involve at least four separate criminal cases challenging police use for evidence of footage gathered without a warrant from CCTV retail cameras linked to automated number plate recognition (ANPR) systems, the ruling was reserved.
Another wee blip came after RNZ reported last year that new billboards at Wellington's train stations would sport cameras from the same Swedish company that supplies surveillance products to China. In a quick-about, the billboard company ditched the cameras.
MetLink began installing large digital billboards at Wellington railway stations last year, despite not being aware of the cameras embedded in them. Photo: RNZ / Phil Pennington
A third speed bump came just last week, when NZTA deferred using number-plate spotting cameras on a highway (see below).
The march is mostly one way, though - including to the bank for the tech-makers and marketers, who are known to protest at the media calling their products "surveillance".
Such sensitivities have not put off governments spending on public-private hybrid systems.
New Zealand has its own, used by powerful state agencies, the police and Immigration.
Many of the camera systems could run facial recognition (FR). Sometimes you are just asked to trust the FR function is not switched on.
A quick swing-around what we know about the surveilled society:
- Buses - This is the latest. San Fran company Hayden AI that puts car-identifying cameras in bus windshields and has teamed up with big public transport contractor, NEC New Zealand. They are marketing their product to ping drivers crowding bus-stops, bus lanes or cycle lanes, as a road safety tool.
- Automatic Number Plate Recognition CCTV systems - At least 5000, and possibly up to 10,000 or more, privately owned CCTV cameras nationwide are linked in to two separate privately owned AI-enabled systems for recognising number plates. Police officers tap into this when investigating retail and other crime. Your local council quite likely has some of these. Rollout - since 2015.
- Airports - Customs is regularly upgrading the facial recognition technology at its e-gates, it checks your face against your passport in less than a blink of an eye - though the biometric data is then held for three months. It has just put out a tender to add a biosecurity function.
- ANPR on Transmission Gully - The Transport Agency wanted to put ANPR cameras at either end of Transmission Gully motorway near Wellington, to record vehicle travel times in order to see if the road was being run sweetly by its private operator. The question of the plates captures being matched back to the Motor Vehicle Registry remains open - as does whether NZTA will actually go ahead with this, after deferring it at the end of July. Rollout - 2024, but deferred.
- Billboards - The latest can watch you as you go by and tailor their ads to suit. The country had at least 1400 high-tech billboards last year; it had at least 49 that also have number-plate recognition cameras to count cars (not identify their owners, the operators insist). Some malls have smartscreens that can gauge your mood.
- Bodycams - Police still do not have these, but prison guards and checkout operators do. Woolworths rolled them out at almost 200 stores in April, with footage downloaded and stored by Singaporean company CSE. Rollout - 2024.
- Speed-safety cams - The new speed cams going in on highways are powerful enough to see inside your car, and smart enough to send what's wanted back for analysing by AI. Driver on the phone, ping. Not wearing a seatbelt, ping. Waka Kotahi swears this will be used judiciously. Rollout - tests from mid-2023.
- Congestion charging and tolling - The cameras and new back office tech for these will ensure all that data you generate every day moving about is not lost to the ether, but stored, possibly anonymously, somewhere, possibly in a cloud-computer hypercentre in Sydney or Canberra, for help in generating the next business case.
The CCTV room at an Auckland business association, in May. (File photo) Photo: RNZ/ Finn Blackwell
Cameras are not quite the least of surveillance, but are only one part of it.
Another is the spread of systems that do not rely on cameras but surveil anyway, collecting data on you about where you go and what you do, and storing it and possibly sharing it, under agreements and contracts aimed at protecting your privacy and keeping your profile from becoming a tradeable commodity, though that has not worked so well elsewhere, such as on social media platforms.
Such as:
- Cobwebs - the virtual equivalent of spying with cameras, this tech has been surveilling people's social media for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment's MI intelligence unit, to deter boatpeople smugglers, it says. The ministry is in the market to replace it with similar tech. Rollout - 2020.
- National Ticketing Solution - This will get you on a bus or train anywhere by scanning your phone. The quid pro quo of any such convenience is always control - that you pass control of your travelling data over to state agency NZTA, and its contractor, Cubic, which happens to have a defence surveillance and reconnaissance arm.
Though it seems there is always room for more surveillance, it is not as if New Zealand has eyes everywhere. Other countries are much closer to blanket coverage.
Of the billion-plus CCTV cameras in the world, China has the most, the US an awful lot, and Africa not many. While by some rough estimates New Zealand has one camera for every 12 people, Shanghai has one-for-two.
A crucial development is that public agencies used to buy the hardware and run it, and so keep the data in-house; now they often buy in complete packages in a build-operate contract with the tech company that often harvests and stores the data.
Just as there has been software-as-a-service (SaaS) for a while, there is also now surveillance-as-a-service.
Again, it is convenient, and the proliferation of this new type of SaaS did not get in the way of New Zealand recently signing up to a US-led 'Joint statement on efforts to counter the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware'.