I’ve been teaching tech security to older adults for the past year, so I’ve been reading lots of interesting (and terrifying) articles, and also attempting to answer even more interesting questions.

One question had to do with the high number of security cameras in the wild, and what computers could do with all that data.

As of right now, the answer is–think everything is a cow or a sheep or perhaps a bicycle.

There are security cameras everywhere–in 2018 it was estimated that the average Londoner was caught on camera 300 times per day. But what does that coverage mean right now? It means that a human needs to sit down and go through that coverage, sometimes frame by frame, before they can get any information out of that overwhelming amount of data.

Citations:
The Elephant in the Image (Improbable Research)
Identifying the Elephant in Object Detection (VAST lab (Vision And Security Technology) at the Department of Computer Science, at University of Colorado, at Colorado Springs)
This Neural Net Hallucinates Sheep (Nautilus)
Gazing Back at the Surveillance Cameras That Watch Us