By: The Economist
March 9, 2021
AMONG THE most pernicious aspects of the range of surveillance technologies available to the average police force is how they can render the visible invisible. For instance, you would notice if a police officer walked down your street every day, writing down the licence plates of every car. A police department would have to decide that assigning an officer to that task is worth the time and manpower. But automatic number-plate readers (small, flat cameras attached to the hood or boot of police cars) do the same thing, and unless you know what they look like, you would probably never notice them—yet they can compile a granular record of everywhere you drive.
Such technologies make the police’s job easier. But they can chill free expression: public employees, say, might hesitate to attend political protests or rallies if they knew they would be tracked. Other forms of surveillance technology, such as devices that simulate mobile-phone towers, can gather and store metadata from every phone in a certain area: websites visited, texts sent and received, whom the phone called, when and for how long. Facial recognition allows the state to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. Regulations surrounding who can use these technologies and access their data are often non-existent—but city by city and state by state, that is starting to change.