Freelance Guard (View CCTV)

It is no secret that the number of surveillance cameras (CCTV) on the streets, in office buildings, shops is growing exponentially. In a regular supermarket, there are about a dozen of them, and in the hype the number of CCTV can be up to hundreds. The problem here is how to thoroughly analyze the image from all these cameras. Even the multitasking genius is not able to closely monitor a dozen monitors at the same time.

The British company Internet Eyes solved this problem creatively and in the spirit of modern time: they use crowdsourcing. Anyone can register on the site and after submitting documents to do a video analysis of CCTV in real time. Users are rewarded based on the amount of material viewed (hourly). However, there is a catch here: the remuneration hardly covers the cost of subscription to the service (a paid subscription is entered at the request of the authorities, see below for details), so it’s unlikely to work this way. However, the most active "overseer" for the month is entitled to a reward of 1000 pounds ($ 1,589).

The typical occupation of the “remote security guard” is to watch the customers in the stores and see that there are no thefts of goods. Each user looks at the four screens and presses the “Alert” button if he sees something suspicious. An SMS and a picture from the camera are instantly received by the store manager who owns this surveillance camera, and he assesses the threat level on a three-point scale (these points are needed to compile a user rating, the winner of which for the month receives £ 1,000).

Human rights activists are already beating the alarm and demanding to stop the vicious practice of voyeurism. According to them (and according to current regulations on regulation of CCTV ), in the UK, only specially trained people should be involved in such monitoring.
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According to human rights activists, in theory, users can record video from CCTV and upload it to file-sharing networks. And in general, they say, the project of “civilian spies” is immoral: if people want to fight crime, they should go to the police. Here they hide behind computer screens and look forward to crime in order to earn money.

The threat of privacy has been alarmed at the Office of the Information Commissioner . It was this organization that forced the introduction of mandatory document verification and a paid subscription, although initially the project was conceived as free for users.

The businessmen and advocates of crowdsourcing themselves insist that everything here is absolutely legal. And what kind of abuse can we talk about if you can find a working webcam on almost every street through Google? And then the "spectators" bring real benefits to society and fight crime. Some users of the service say that they did not register for the sake of earning money, but to fight crime, because their civic duty requires it.