Being Watched: Embedding Ethics in Public Cameras

Cities are adopting camera technologies, including public video cameras and sensors, that use AI to process visual data with the promise of improving services, enhancing management capabilities, and lowering costs. However, privacy is a core challenge to using the data, as the public lacks trust in how governments use camera-generated video data. This project focuses on investigating the social acceptance of cameras and video data and developing technical solutions that will satisfy privacy concerns, including blurring faces and other identifying information when using biometric data so that machine learning models can be trained to remove these privacy attributes from raw videos.