Speaking to the Home Affairs Committee in Westminster on Tuesday, Dr Ian Forbes said that people should be made aware of how footage of them is being used and stored.
Forbes claimed that people need the ability to find out how and why cameras are to be used before they are installed to ensure they are not monitored unncessarily.
However, MPs on the committee said that CCTV remains popular with their constituents, and Forbes admitted that the idea of having their privacy affected by over four million cameras “seems not to have been a consideration of the public”.
He also called for signage in areas already monitored telling the public how the footage is being stored and who can see it. The current system, he said, leaves ‘no opportunity’ for people to object to the use of cameras.
Shami Chakrabarti from the human rights group Liberty also gave evidence at the event, part of a government investigation into claims that the UK is now a surveillance society. She said that we are not protecting our privacy rigourously enough when faced with important security concerns.
She said, “The political, legal and ethical debate must keep pace with technological advances” if we are to protect our privacy. Liberty’s written statement to MPs also claimed that there is ‘growing public unease about the extent of the surveillance society’.
This was a fact disputed by Labour MP David Winnick, who said: “If there is such concern, why do I get letters asking for more CCTV?”
Chakrabarti argued that CCTV had simply become acceptable in British culture, and added, “Having lots of cameras everywhere is not the best use of public money and it’s not particularly well regulated”.
Forbes, who works at the Royal Academy of Engineering, also said that a ‘positive approach’ to surveillance- where operators do not actively look for bad behaviour of individuals- would help to build public support for CCTV.
According to Forbes’ written statement, hardly any attention has been paid to the positive uses of CCTV. ‘Local communities and citizens under surveillance have few if any opportunities to see and learn from what the vast number of cameras see’, it says.
In March a report co-written by Forbes argued that it is possible to have a win-win on security and privacy.
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