One to watch: Open-source code that measures your exposure to CCTV
With an estimated billion surveillance cameras capturing people's daily activities, chances are you're regularly recorded if you live in a densely populated area.and the average person is estimated to be recorded 300 times per day.
To help people understand when they're on camera and how ubiquitous cameras affect their privacy, computer scientists affiliated with the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland have released open-source software calledThe software, part of a broader initiative to allow people to make better decisions about their privacy, is described intitled,"CCTV-Exposure: An open-source system for measuring user’s privacy exposure to mapped CCTV cameras based on geo-location." The paper, authored by Hannu Turtiainen, Andrei Costin, and Timo Hamalainen, is an extended version of research presented at the Business Modeling and Software Design: 12th International Symposium in Fribourg, Switzerland. It describes the software as analogous to a Geiger counter for detecting harmful radiation. "When compared to exposure to 'harmful environments' such as exposure to radiation, the CCTV-Exposure system is intended to act like a 'CCTV dosage meter' for travel activities of privacy-minded individuals," the paper explains. The software, written in Python 3, requires two input files: a global position system exchange file containing the GPS coordinates of a person's travels, and an XML file of camera location coordinates.That said, there is an ongoing effort by the team to collect together a broader set of coordinates, using computer vision algorithms to identify surveillance cameras in Google Street View images. The researchers anticipate providing an API that will supply this camera location data to users to CCTV-Exposure, making the code readily useful. It's hoped that people can also submit their own reports of camera locations to be included in the database. Right now, without this camera data, this project is very much one to watch, rather than one to get started with right away. Unless, of course, you in the meantime create your own camera location tables and use that with the code, which you're all free to do and share with others. Once software has the info it needs – your journey and details of surrounding CCTV – it calculates where the supplied route was exposed to a security camera. Its JSON-formatted output includes:Distance: total distance traveled in the segment, total exposure distance, average and mean distance to cameras Percentages: exposure per total distance, exposure time per total time There's also a Rust version of the code but it requires time-stamped GPX files due to parser limitations. In a test of the software based on Jyvaskyla route data captured from researchers using Garmin devices, average CCTV exposure came to 12.5 percent based on distance and 15.1 percent based on time. Andrei Costin, assistant professor at University of Jyvaskyla in Finland and co-founder/CEO of security firm binare.io, toldin a phone interview that the CCTV paper is one of five models he and his colleagues have developed to promote CCTV awareness.Costin said there's a lot of discussion about how many cameras there are in China, in the UK capital, and elsewhere, but this is based on hearsay, marketing pitches, and obscure methodologies that are not sound, scientific approaches. This led to Costin and his colleagues developing a way to better define CCTV camera coverage. As mentioned above, their approach relies on computer vision and machine-learning to identify and geolocate CCTV cameras captured in Google Street View images and to calculate where the cameras can see. This data can be fed into CCTV-Exposure to make it all work, and it's hoped that this info will be provided via an online interface. There is no timeline for the availability of this, and the team asked for people to contact them if they can help financially or technically to make it happen. "We developed the system based on Google Street View because it's the biggest source of street view imagery," explained Costin."But our system also allows users to submit in real-time, taking a snapshot of a CCTV camera while their location is enabled and sending that to our servers."Costin said the group working on this project – which incorporates
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