Cameras aren't new. What's changed is scale, and what the technology attached to a camera can now do without a person in the loop. A handful of trends explain most of the discomfort people reasonably feel:
Networked license plate readers. Companies have built systems that log every plate that passes a camera, pool the reads across thousands of agencies and cities, and keep them searchable for months. That's not "a camera at a gate" anymore — it's a movement history on anyone who drives, built without most of those people ever agreeing to it.
Facial recognition with real error rates. Independent testing has repeatedly found that face-matching algorithms perform worse on darker skin tones and on women than on light-skinned men — and a false match aimed at the wrong person by an automated system, acted on without a human checking first, has already led to wrongful arrests. Accuracy on average isn't the same as accuracy for everyone.
Data that outlives its purpose. Storage is cheap, so the easy default is "keep everything, forever, just in case." That default quietly turns a security tool into a surveillance archive — one that can be subpoenaed, breached, sold, or repurposed for something nobody originally agreed to.
Workplace and landlord monitoring creep. Keystroke loggers, productivity scores, cameras aimed at where people eat lunch instead of where inventory sits — monitoring sold as "security" or "efficiency" has a documented pattern of expanding past its stated purpose once it's installed.
Nobody to appeal to. When an algorithm flags you, denies you entry, or triggers a police call, and there's no human who reviewed it and no clear way to contest it, that's a due-process problem as much as a privacy one.
None of this means cameras are bad. It means the scrutiny is earned, and any company in this industry — us included — should be able to explain exactly where it stands on each of these points, not just say "we take privacy seriously" and move on.
The concerns above are about scale, automation, and secrecy — not about cameras existing at all. A system built the opposite way solves real problems without most of that baggage:
This is also, not coincidentally, the model we've built our own monitoring around — see Trust & Transparency for the specifics.
Whether it's a security vendor, an employer, a landlord, or a government program — the same red flags apply. If you're evaluating any system, including ours, ask about each of these directly.
If a vendor can't give you a straight answer to any of these, that's the answer.
Nothing above is theoretical for us — it's the checklist we hold ourselves to. Read exactly how our monitoring works, where we think surveillance goes wrong, and what we've committed to never doing on Trust & Transparency, or the full retention and data-sharing terms in our Privacy Policy.