By Mikayla van Loon
Australians typically have a complicated relationship with surveillance technologies and privacy as evidenced by researchers from across the country.
One of those researchers, Griffith University lecturer in criminology and criminal justice, Dr Ausma Bernot, has documented the intersection of technology and crime, specifically surveillance and technology governance both in Australia and overseas.
“Australians, compared to China, are less positive towards systems of surveillance. However, if we were to compare those views with the States, we would see that Australians are actually more receptive towards surveillance than folks in the States,” she said.
A doctoral thesis by Aleatha Shanley, a researcher at Edith Cowan University, exploring attitudes towards privacy and surveillance in Australia, also found that Australians are more receptive to surveillance but not when it comes to intrusive forms of surveillance, like drones or facial recognition.
“People are reasonably receptive, however, more intrusive forms of surveillance do not enjoy the same level of passivity,” the research paper reads.
“The impact on civil liberties concerned almost 60 per cent. In contrast, agreement that surveillance devices are effective for crime detection (83 per cent) suggests that people want to be safe from crime but are not willing to sacrifice civil liberties.”
Ms Shanley’s research identified that 73 per cent of respondents to her survey were concerned a facial recognition database may be used for other purposes, while 89 per cent said the technology has potential for misuse.
Dr Bernot called this the “privacy paradox”, a disconnect between what communities want, like that of the Yarra Ranges, and the use and need for effective law enforcement.
“The community wants the imaginary of the security that these technologies are going to give them but research says that it’s not always the case that they really do help,” she said.
“At the same time, they don’t want increased capabilities. So what the community seems to be saying is they want the footage to be there and accessible, but they don’t want the police to have AI facilitated capabilities of analysing that footage.
“Which for law enforcement, if they do have the capability to run facial recognition queries, it would probably be one of the first things they would do with that footage.”
In a Monash University study on facial recognition, which surveyed 2291 Australian respondents over the age of 18, nearly half said “facial recognition used in public spaces is an invasion of privacy”.
When speaking to Star Mail at the beginning of this campaign, Sergeant Cal Cunningham wanted to reassure residents in townships bearing CCTV cameras that facial recognition was not a priority for police.
“We want good quality cameras and it would be beneficial for police work if we get good quality images of offenders. We know who our offenders are in our area. We don’t need facial recognition software. That’s not our agenda,” he said.
When it comes to image capture and facial recognition, attitudes point to an opt-out tendency based on consent but also as a way of having control over what data is collected.
But the issue of data privacy and the need for data sovereignty, Ms Shanley’s research found, were concerns expressed by the majority of respondents who took part in her survey.
Perceived risks to privacy have also vastly changed over a period of 10 years according to Ms Shanley’s research.
In 2013 an Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) survey identified the three biggest risks perceived by participants were the use of online services and social media sites (48 per cent), ID theft or fraud (23 per cent), and data breaches (16 per cent).
By 2020, the rankings changed, with 76 per cent citing identity theft as the top privacy risk, and data breaches ranking second with 61 per cent. Social media sites dropped to third position, but the percentage increased to 58 per cent.
In 2023, 74 per cent reported that data breaches are one of the biggest risks faced today, an increase of 13 per cent compared to 2020.
In the case of the Yarra Ranges, where some CCTV cameras were installed at least 10 years ago without funds to update or maintain, Dr Bernot said that would be causing unintended consequences, some potentially in the space of data privacy.
“When you’re talking about cameras that were installed 10 years ago, if there’s no budget to maintain them, we can guess that the cyber security aspect of these cameras has also not been maintained,” she said.
“You’re installing something for security, but then the cameras are not maintained so it doesn’t necessarily have that capacity and it creates a different problem of data privacy and data security.
“If a camera is really old, it might, over time, become hackable, depending on the model and make of the camera, and perhaps what may happen is the footage from that camera is able to be live streamed somewhere online.”
Because the majority of CCTV cameras connect to networks and not only record on-device, Dr Bernot said this classifies them as Internet of Things devices (IoT devices).
“As IoT devices, new ways to hack into the cameras are found and invented. It is therefore important that there are budgets to patch vulnerabilities that affect these surveillance systems,” she said.
“Without them, the devices become increasingly vulnerable every month, not even year. A compromised device can compromise the whole network.”
When planning for a revitalised system in the Yarra Ranges, Dr Bernot said it was imperative to not only have the funds to maintain the system in its entirety but to ensure transparency was a top priority.
“A good place to start is with transparency. So, for instance, how many cameras are we installing? Law enforcement might not want to say where those cameras are for investigatory purposes, but it’s good to say how many cameras are maintained.
“It’s generally good to say whether or not those cameras were used for actual investigations.
“So perhaps that would be the good starting point to get law enforcement to share a little bit of broad level detail of whether these cameras were useful, maybe they were just not useful at all in investigating crimes.”
Dr Bernot said in research literature there is a mixed view on the use and benefit of CCTV as a crime deterrent.
“We know there is a short term deterrence effect. We also know that there’s some displacement effect. We know that after a short term deterrence effect, there’s also sometimes a spike back to crime rates that were there before, so evidence is mixed and not conclusive on that.”
But if that crime deterrent capability is not being reached, Dr Bernot said it should at least act as a way of providing good footage to police to enable the investigatory purpose.
“If you have cameras and the deterrent effect of those were down, then you should at least be able to use that footage for investigations.
“If the cameras are not maintained or they’re out of date, the footage coming through is pixelated or it doesn’t perform well at night, that’s when the majority of crime occurs, the actual investigatory advantages of that footage is negated and it’s defying its purpose.”
