Proceedings of the XXth Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT (Jan 2021)
Towards CCTV-aware Routing and Navigation for Privacy, Anonymity, and Safety' Feasibility Study in Jyvaskyla
Abstract
AbstractIn order to withstand the ever-increasing invasion of privacy by CCTV cameras and technologies, on par CCTV-aware solutions must exist that provide privacy, safety, and cybersecurity features. We argue that a first important step towards such CCTV-aware solutions must be a mapping system (e.g., Google Maps, OpenStreetMap) that provides both privacy and safety routing and navigation options. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there are no mapping nor navigation systems that support CCTV-privacy and CCTV-safety routing options. At the same time, in order to move the privacy vs. safety debate related to CCTV surveillance cameras from purely subjective to data-driven and evidence-based domain, it would require to implement and evaluate a globally-relevant CCTV-aware routing and navigation system. This however, would require a tremendous initial effort without any guarantees about the feasibility and the end result. Therefore, we propose first a preliminary evaluation of such CCTV-aware technology at a small scale, for example a medium-sized European city. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a CCTV-aware routing and navigation solution. The aim of this feasibility exploration is to understand what are the main impacts of CCTV on privacy, and what are the challenges and benefits to building such technology. We evaluate our approach on six (6) pedestrian walking routes within the downtown area of city of Jyvaskyla, Finland. We first map a total of 450 CCTV cameras, and then experiment with routing and navigation under several different configurations to coarsely model the possible cameras parameters and coverage from the real-world. We report two main results. First, our preliminary findings support the overall feasibility of our approach. Second, the results also reveal a data-driven worrying reality for persons wishing to preserve their privacy/anonymity as their main living choice. When modelling cameras at their low performance end, a privacy-preserving route has on average a 1.5x distance increase when compared to generic routing. When modelling cameras at their medium-to-high performance end, a privacy-preserving route has on average a 5.0x distance increase, while in some cases there are no routes possible at all, i.e., privacy/anonymity must be given up to reach the destination. These results further support and encourage both global mapping of CCTV cameras and refinements to camera modelling and underlying technology in the context of more accurate CCTV-aware routing and navigation.
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