Tony Morgan is indignant. I’ve just asked him whether his newly launched website Internet Eyes is more of a game than a serious way of fighting crime through surveillance.
The site streams live CCTV footage from shop floors onto our screens at home. It’s then the public’s job to spot something untoward, and if we do, there’s a cash reward up for grabs. All you have to do is press an alert button on your screen, and a warning text message goes direct to the shopkeeper. Not exactly 80s gameshow thriller, The Running Man, but these things all have to start somewhere…right?
The site has already received a lot of coverage, and not all of it is very positive. But perhaps we should hold our collective kneejerk reaction; the site after all, has been sanctioned for use by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and the idea is as brilliant as it is unsettling.
“Everyone is watched all the time”
Founder Morgan, 64, says that the scheme isn’t so far removed from the BBC’s Crimewatch show. In order to tackle crime effectively, he says, we need to stop it at the source: “People use our site to see if they can help reduce shoplifting. It’s cheaper to stop something than to solve it. Crimewatch rewards people for solving crimes and so do we. At the end of the month, we award people for vigilance.”
He goes on, addressing the various accusations of voyeurism that the site has attracted. “Yes, people have been saying stuff about snoopers… one man asked: ‘What happens if my wife wanted to go to the shop in her rollers, she doesn’t want people to see that.’
“But people would see anyway,” Morgan continues, “people who were in that shop and people she doesn’t know. It’s a ridiculous argument. Everyone is watched all the time. On webcam.com you can watch people on streets, in bars all over the country. When we did our research, we watched one particular place in Edinburgh.
“We watched a girl… a waitress… look around for her boss at the bar and then use the company phone to make a personal call. That’s worse than what we’re doing. No one can get any pleasure out of Internet Eyes at all.”
A helping hand for small businesses
Four years ago, Morgan was watching something on TV about shoplifting being on the increase. People couldn’t monitor their own CCTV footage because there wasn’t enough manpower, he says. So it was there that he first thought up the idea for Internet Eyes. He couldn’t do it earlier, he explains, because broadband was too slow.
At that time he was running a restaurant in Henley-in-Arden and, a little later, started up a family-run B&B in Dawlish, Devon. This perhaps goes a little way to explain his sympathies with small businesses, something the site caters specifically for.
Paulam Patel owns six convenience stores in Reading and recently linked three of his shops up to the scheme. It has made such a difference to his everyday working life, he says, that he is signing up another two of his stores next Tuesday.
“You can’t sit watching TV all day at the counter,” he says. “My working life now is easy…I’m not always thinking, ‘Which camera…which camera?'” It hasn’t reduced the amount of customers coming in either, he says.
While bigger stores like Sainsburys and Tescos can allow for loss to a certain extent, Morgan explains “this is for the smaller shopkeeper who, when he loses something, he misses it.” At a time where independent shops and smaller chains have to compete with supermarket giants, it is no wonder why shrewd businessmen like Patel are turning to Internet Eyes to protect their livelihood.
Facebook and ‘unfair’ subscription fees
But what about the rights of the user monitoring feeds? Internet Eyes has not censored its Facebook page, aside from monitoring foul language, so I see that it is riddled with complaints about the subscription fee for users. Typically, you pay GB pound 2 a month to register or GB pound 13 for a whole year. Some users don’t see a need to pay at all, while others have criticised the decision to charge when the site is still in its ‘beta’ testing stage.
One of its gentler critics, Chris Pilgram, said on 11 October: “I know this is a groundbreaking idea but it obviously needs a great deal of work to implement it effectively, therefore I cannot see why users are being charged anything at the moment.”
Internet Eyes says the subscription fee was added following a consultation with the ICO, so that they might tackle any “voyeuristic gains” by users.
A spokesman from the watchdog confirmed that they had been in touch with the company and said: “Our advice to Internet Eyes was about making sure they comply with the Data Protection Act.
“In particular, they need to ensure that viewers are only watching footage for the purposes for which the system was designed. Internet Eyes has decided that charging a subscription fee is one way of making sure they are able to do this effectively.”
The ICO vets users for fraud as they sign up, and all cameras and users are anonymous. Users are only able to view footage outside their postcode and the shops that have joined the scheme are given window stickers to inform their customers. Security for the site is high, as its DNS operates its own secure VPN, or Virtual Private Network. (See attachment on the rightside panel for further details.)
David Cameron’s big society
Some feedback is very positive. Duncan Balcon, also writing on the company’s Facebook page, said: “Have been in the [business] most of my [professional] life. There is a good chance this could work. Give it a chance. No essential difference to the CCTV these places have had for years. I will be interested to see where it has landed in three or four years.”
The Wokingham Times goes further and suggests the scheme is an extension of Neighbourhood Watch, while Max Patey, commercial director for Internet Eyes and also Tony’s stepson, compares it to David Cameron’s big society.
While it is questionable that Cameron’s drive to bring control away from Government and back into individual communities involves sanctioning the wider use of surveillance, Patey makes a good argument.
“We live in a country of free speech,” Patey says. “This is more in line with David Cameron’s big society, to allow people to be responsible for themselves and act like grownups.”
And in response to worries about a growing Orwellian surveillance state, he says: “It is not Big Brother because that is about the state taking control. This is about public taking responsibility. 90% of people have no idea what they’re talking about, but that’s their choice, and we like that.”
There have been other problems reported on the site. Some viewers couldn’t log on properly, and some had difficulties with their Paypal accounts. There also seem to be many more budding security guards than there are cameras, according to the latest complaint on its Facebook page. All things that are fairly typical in the early days of a start-up and that will be ironed out soon, the company says.
Privacy menace or a leg-up for small businesses?
In fact, every one of the criticisms levelled at the existence of Internet Eyes has been addressed with a considered and well-thought out antidote.
It is not the first time that a company has had to defend the uses of its cameras either; think of Big Brother and other, lesser known reality TV shows. Sure, the contestants sign up to be watched and judged by the public 24/7, but do they really know what they’re getting themselves into? Is its metamorphosis into real life really so different?
Perhaps so. It might be the sterile administration of justice or the idea of somebody watching you from their sofa without proper security credentials; either way, some people will find Internet Eyes hard to stomach. But issues surrounding privacy have always been contentious and those who work in the security industry will know this.
Whatever camp you reside in, you are most likely asking yourself, how far will this go? Should we embrace Internet Eyes as the natural evolution of surveillance, or is it another start-up scheme destined to disappear without a trace?
Free Download: The Video Surveillance Report 2023
Discover the latest developments in the rapidly-evolving video surveillance sector by downloading the 2023 Video Surveillance Report. Over 500 responses to our survey, which come from integrators to consultants and heads of security, inform our analysis of the latest trends including AI, the state of the video surveillance market, uptake of the cloud, and the wider economic and geopolitical events impacting the sector!
Download for FREE to discover top industry insight around the latest innovations in video surveillance systems.
