Public Surveillance of Bars

This article about an app that lets people remotely view bars to see if they’re crowded or not is filled with commentary—on both sides—about privacy and openness.

Tags: privacy, surveillance

Posted on July 2, 2024 at 7:06 AM • 12 Comments

Comments

Mexaly • July 2, 2024 9:30 AM

Orwell was wrong.
We have a bunch of bratty Little Brothers.

Robin • July 2, 2024 9:49 AM

From the article:
* “If you have a credit card, they already know everything about you,” said Dan Berg
* “But I don’t really care,” Sherman said. “I’d assume I’m in public.”
* Harris was skeptical of privacy concerns and pointed out that drinking and clubbing hotspots are hardly secluded settings. “I continue to believe that you don’t go to a bar or club for privacy,” Harris said. “You are surrounded by strangers.”

So, three people who seem not to understand what “streaming on the internet” means.

It raises well-worn questions about how to balance a useful service for many against a (possibly existential) threat to a few, but:

In any case, this is an idea that is destined to fail: some person, probably a woman, gets identified by an unstable ex who follows her out of a bar and batters her. She sues the bar, the bar manager, the bar owner, the streaming service, everyone within range. Every bar in the world pulls out of the service, the service goes bankrupt and shuts its doors. Just a matter of time.

Snarki, child of Loki • July 2, 2024 10:30 AM

“Two bots log in to a bar…”

still working on the rest of the joke.

Sean • July 2, 2024 12:05 PM

I can foresee this being used by law enforcement to look up those places which are popular, so as to have, just around each exit from them, a nice ossifer or three sitting in a cruiser, and pulling over each vehicle leaving there, to do a blow and show, because they all were “driving poorly, and the wheel of the car went over the yellow line while exiting the parking lot”.

Said ossifers just so were there during shift waiting for a call out, no way that they were there to entrap drivers who may or may not have had a little too much, pure happenstance, because they stop at random places, as seen in the logs. That they are aware, and are pulling over DUI’s every night, especially on weekends, of course is coincidence.

Grumpy Old Coot • July 2, 2024 12:17 PM

Creepy and a stalker’s delight. I expect something like this would be well loved by divorce lawyers, blackmailers, and employers trying to justify firing people.

iAPX • July 2, 2024 1:00 PM

If the images was analyzed by an IA, and the video stream discarded properly without any storage, to give an indication about how a bar is crowded, relatively compared to usual (for it) and relatively from normalized bar crowd, why not?

Relatively compared to usual, because those that know this bar will come when it’s crowded, or not.
Relatively compared to normalized bar crowd, because if you don’t know it, you want to know if it’s a crowded place or not.
Why not?

But video stream available…
What could go wrong?

ratwithahat • July 2, 2024 5:15 PM

I personally would be most worried about how this platform enables stalkers, muggers, and other malicious actors to target vulnerable people, i.e. people who are drunk. Blurring out faces doesn’t really work when clothes can be just as recognizable.

he hadn’t really considered that people would take issue with being streamed without their consent, pointing out […] these establishments already have security cameras.

I think the interviewee here is misunderstanding what people are objecting to. It’s not the act of being filmed which is objectionable, but the purpose at which footage is being put to. It’s one thing to have footage stored in case it needs to be reviewed later on but otherwise not looked at, and another thing to stream it to the whole world.

One issue I have with the article is that it’s not clear what exactly the app is used for and if there’s even a niche for it. To see who’s performing at a club? Event schedules exist for a reason. To evaluate the crowdedness? There are technologies to count the amount of people in a space–without streaming a livefeed.

Daniel Popescu • July 3, 2024 4:41 AM

What Grumpy said. @Grumpy – very creepy indeed.

fib • July 3, 2024 11:37 AM

@iAPX

How can you be sure the footage is really real-time? It can obviously be abused in many ways, to the detriment of owners and patrons alike.

Clive Robinson • July 3, 2024 4:03 PM

@ iAPX

Re : It’s not your friend.

“If the images was analyzed by an IA, and the video stream discarded properly…”

There are so many things wrong with that idea, it’s difficult to know where to start.

The first and obvious one being “facial recognition” to “Social Scoring” something China is not the only Government interested in.

Then there is a fun one. It’s a bar you and friends use so has a “usual crowd” which ups the head count. So you are not fussed about a high head count. Then a biker convention comes to town and a dozen or so hog-jocks or similar go in. The head count goes up as expected but not by the expected crowd. Would you still want to go to that bar when the crowd is not the normal one?

I could go on at length, but the reality is you can not make the system safe, and that’s the actual bottom line.

a reader • July 19, 2024 2:52 PM

I used to go into a bar where someone there would take occasional flash photos of their otherwise dimly lit fellow patrons. It did not seem prosocial. But at least it was ‘legible’.

Shodan • August 3, 2024 9:33 AM

Some years ago I found loads of live CCTV cams online.
I could watch people buy coffee or potato chips in 7-11 and Wawa in New Jersey, also the center of a university campus.
The campus cam I could get the controls on my screen, pan, tilt and zoom, look over a shoulder at the book someone was reading while seated on a low stone wall.
Bar cams are not surprising.

Public Surveillance of Bars

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