OPN Launch: Advancing Privacy & Security
#OpenSurveillance for #CameraDay2019
The day OpenConsent launches OPN the Open Surveillance Network - June 20, 2019
Today the UK Camera Commissioner, Tony Porter, has an incredible challenge. Camera and other sensing and AI technologies are widely in use to identify people and the way they walk, talk, type, think, speak, buy and browse.
The scope for a surveillance commissioner is rapidly growing beyond CCTV (Closed Circuit Television). This scope and the surveillance commissioner role needs to grow quickly to protect democratic society and economies. It also needs to enable and shepherd the safe, clean and exponential growth of IoT in smart cities, villages, farms, factories and infrastructure around the planet. There is a tremendous opportunity to address surveillance and to advance the global state of privacy and security.
At EEMA on June 19th, we announced the OPN Surveillance Network. We invite all to join in the #OpenSurveillance campaign. Starting with CCTV we aim to make privacy, consent and #OpenSurveillance a reality in the UK.
OpenConsent’s OPN (Operational Privacy Network) is an open security and privacy notification network built with international standards that extends privacy and surveillance transparency across domains and jurisdictions.
Surveillance Camera Day is an opportunity for the UK to ignite a modern discourse on surveillance. We aim to evolve the governance of camera surveillance with co-regulation that results in operational privacy and in doing so extend digital consent to public spaces.
In conjunction with Surveillance Camera Day, we have opened a Video Surveillance, and IoT Registration service. The OPN service provides free digital transparency and privacy enhancements for video surveillance systems, and includes a public network for registering facial ID for surveillance by consent.
About OPeN Surveillance
The co-founders of OpenConsent are expert and experienced practitioners in intelligent infrastructure, identity, security and surveillance standards. Mark Lizar’s graduate research focused on the contextual integrity of CCTV transparency, and a result of the research, the CCTV cameral locations for all councils in the UK. Sal D’Agostino’s experience covers 40 years in the field , including an 18 year stint at Computer Recognition Systems which installed the first commercial plate reading system in the Dartford tunnel in 1979, and facial recognition in Heathrow in 1986.
Through mutual interests in standards at the Kantara Initiative and other SDOs. Mark and Sal came to work together to address what both came to see as the need for innovative approaches to identity, access, privacy and security. Over the last several years, together with a communities of interest, Mark and Sal have been apart of developing international privacy standards that make OpenSurveillance, as an infrastructure result, possible. It is these standards that the OPN Network now integrates into services to make it easy for people to see, understand and use privacy rights in context of camera surveillance.
The benchmark challenge
Today, 80% of the existing camera surveillance infrastructure does not provide sufficient operational privacy for surveillance to be used by (as opposed to on) the public. The 17-year study, started by the EU Urban Eye project, led by Clive Norris, not only shows transparency compliance is declining, it also indicates that 20% of open surveillance systems are so expensive for police and security services to use that there is no option to introduce the benefits of surveillance in smart cities in a way that scales.
By offering a free public transparency service we make it easy for existing cameras surveillance infrastructure to enhance it’s current systems and add operational privacy functionality.
Going Forward
Champions in this space today, like Professor Andrew Charlesworth who are calling for an independent review of how the UK implements CCTV analytics technology, for Facial ID, are now critical. OpenConsent lends our voice to these calls for public discussion on how the UK will address the challenges of the modern surveillance age. And, with a baseline benchmark approach, we aim to enable the co-regulation the CCTV code of practice represents.