Professor Richard Buckland

Everyone's doing it is the argument.

Yeah, everyone's doing it so I can.

I mean, this is, I guess, just taking a quick diversion, this is really the problem with the cameras, you put your finger on it in a nutshell, that we're slowly drifting by a series of incremental steps towards

And at every point, we can make an argument that if you don't look at it too carefully, you think, oh, yeah, that's reasonable.

But as we make step by step by step, people's privacy and ability to live a life not being surveilled is diminished.

And arguments then are, well, you've already lost it, so we can just keep doing it.

So this incremental drift is actually quite scary.

Visual capture.

is very widespread.

There's cameras everywhere if we take it step by step, including lots of private cameras pointing onto the street.

It's very hard to walk around.

In Sydney, if you drive down the road to the Blue Mountains, there used to be one surveillance camera at the beginning.

There's now one every 200 metres.

I don't know how they got the budget to do that.

So then there's facial recognition applied to recordings, and that is not so widely done by people.

That's more forensic to people.

But real-time facial recognition, that has commercial advantages, and people do use that.

And Bunnings and Kmart is a famous case that happened recently where they were using it to identify people that would be abusive to their staff,

Or people that committed various sorts of fraud, either checkout fraud, not scanning things, or people who made multiple fraudulent returns and claimed money back on items they hadn't bought in the store.

This was met with a lot of public shock that they were recording people and identifying people without telling them.