Searching for your lost car in the shopping centre parking lot ranks high on the list of modern hells. But a new system, built from a mesh of networked cameras, tracks the vehicles of confused shoppers. Super convenience or ORWELLIAN NIGHTMARE?
The surveillance system, deployed at shopping centre Santa Monica Place, records your car’s licence plate, retrieving its garage slot from a stored video database should you forget where you parked it. Then, simply follow map directions to your ride. Which sounds like it would prevent a lot of tantrums and pains-in-asses! But, of course, the Los Angeles Times reports, there are privacy concerns.
Since the shopping centre records the footage, they own the footage. Which is where the hypothetical fascist 1984 Big Brother hair-pulling begins. “If I had an ex-boyfriend who I didn’t want to find me, that could be a concern,” frets one worried shopper. Yes, except, if your boyfriend knows your licence plate number, he presumably knows where you live as well – which should be more of a concern than him accosting you in a highly public venue like a crowded Californian shopping centre. Unless he’s just coming to the shopping centre every day and punching in the number with the slight hope that you showed up that day. Which seems… less than plausible.
The normally extremely sane and highly insightful Federation of American Scientists are also pissed – “What should give people pause is that this technology is advancing upon us without anyone having chosen it,” says senior research analyst Steven Aftergood. “We have not decided as a society or as individuals that we want this convenience. It is being thrust upon us.” Yes, except we did choose to go to the shopping centre.
We should always be conscious (and cautious) of how our public presence is being tracked – of course. But defaulting to worst case scenarios is an exercise in scaremongering. The notion that Santa Monica Place is going to do something nefarious with the knowledge of where you parked your car last Sunday is no more worrisome than the potential for Facebook to do something with every photo, correspondance and personal detail it possesses from the past five years of my life. Shopping centres – like many other places outside our homes – are blanketed in security cameras anyway. With that given, they might as well be helping us find our cars at the end of a day of horrible shopping.
“If I was somebody famous and worried about my personal security, I would be concerned,” explains another shopper, while looking for her car. “Since I’m basically nobody, I’m not too concerned.”
Pretty much.