Digital Privacy

In an ambitious project (to my knowledge the most ambitious world-wide), Thailand will install one million CCTV cameras in Bangkok in the next three years. Amazingly, this project will only cost 2 Million EUR, which would amount to 2 EUR per camera. This is very unrealistic, to say the least. So how does Thailand plan to finance all these cameras? By requiring residents to pay for this extra protection a monthly fee between 2 and 4 Euros per month.

It will be interesting to see how they plan to make use of these cameras. Currently, there are just vague hints about face recognition and video analysis but no details are given. Obviously, such an amount of cameras cannot be managed manually but automatic analysis can only detect clearly defined events and face recognition is far from anything we see in Enemy of the State or CSI. Without automatic analysis of the videos these cameras are as good as dummy cams. I guess at least privacy won’t be a big issue for them.