I think it is only logical that things would progress in this way, though the only thing really novel about it is that they put all these existing technologies into one fixture. I don't really like the idea of someone constantly watching me, but the career path I have chosen isn't exactly conducive to privacy. There is someone or something watching everything I do, and I've just resolved to the fact. What concerns me with these systems is the general ease of "hackability." It's way to easy for the wrong people to get access to that data, and too easy for people to use it for the wrong reasons.
All those smart things are a solution in search for problems, and the people developing them do want to build companies and make money, so they find effective ways to push it. The way is, to convince the main crowd that it is beneficial, even if logically it is either not needed, or could be achieved in a much simpler way, or is not related at all. Our experience is, that when you call anything "smart", everyone buys into it and noone questions it. The "buying smart things makes you smart" is no different than "buying cool things makes you cool"
The next step is, that if anything have data input capability and network connection, it can be used for surveillance, whether for commercial or power purposes. Sometimes for not really a defined purpose at all, what is called "just in case" (in case we find a problem that needs this solution)
The municipalities etc fall somewhere between the other parties : The "smart" industry targets them. Most consumers do expect things to be getting "smart" and the municipalities want to please them. The municipalities themselves, and possibly governments, do sometimes want to benefit from the surveillance capabilities
It is logical, that some careers (yours ?) requires watching over your shoulder, but it is ultimately you who chose this career. It is not logical or normal, that surveillance become the standard
Things that become unwritten standard requirement are generally a threat to our liberty. For example :
- There are researches that prove, that people who are not on Facebook are people with psychological and psychiatric problems
- There have been cases, where boss of a company would refuse to hire, when he asks the would-be employee to show him his Facebook profile, and the guy says he does not have one. This could be truth. This could be a lie, if the guy (rightfully so) thinks his facebook is off limits. The boss might assume the guy is not normal (backed by the researches), or that he is hiding something (as if, it is not ok)
Regarding "hackability", the ones most expected to abuse the information are the ones in hold of it, for a number of reasons :
- There is quite little, what use a hacker from the side could do with information about available parking spots, or even about parked cars with identifying personal information. This information is much more useful for implementing mass surveillance
- To implement mass surveillance, it is important to correlate constant data input from multiple sources. A hacker from the side would have to break into each of them and put work into maintaining those breaches functional. The municipality or government have access to all that by default
That system already exists and I don't believe it uses a camera of any sorts. There is a shopping centre nearby which has a something called a "Car park guidance system" which has a sensor above each parking spot and a indicator at the end of the spot which is green when the spot is free and red when the spot is taken. It can be seen from a distance in the car park and is hooked up to displays throughout the car park to show the number of available parking spots.
Whether these systems relay information to a cloud or a server is unknown.
There is a similar system at the parking lot of the Cinemall mall, and it often lies in the number of the lots available, and marking green lights at a used lot and not at a free lot.
I have seen the system posted by Dor in person. In each indicator "luminaire", there is what looks like a pair of ultrasonic emitter/receptor, aimed towards the parking spot. This would indeed work well in an indoors parking, where the device can be mounted right above the parking spot, but imagine installing something like this outdoors : From the height of a lighting pole it would not work. Installing small poles next to each parking spot is extreme cost. Wiring an inductance measurement loop in the parking spot is expensive too, though otherwise is a good solution. There the camera based systems make sense
The ultrasonic parking spot based system might or might not be transmitting to the cloud, but more importantly, it's input (the ultrasonic receptor) is not capable of inputting any information that could even remotely be used for surveillance
