The U.K.’s Telegraph is reporting that the average British citizen is recorded around 3,000 times per week.

Every phone call, use of a card or computer, creates personal information that is being recorded and stored on British citizens.

The Sunday Telegraph is reporting on the vast amounts of personal data that is being recorded on people by the British Government, law enforcement and corporations daily.

The average person living in Britain has well over 3,000 pieces of personal information recorded and stored on them, most of this information is held in databases for years and sometimes indefinitely.

Personal information that is recorded includes shopping data, cell phone use, emails, daily location information, travels and internet search data.

British information watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, is calling for stricter regulation of the amount of information that is recorded and stored on people and is warning the public to restrict the data they allow groups to keep on them.

Public security breaches and the loss of personal information by Government agencies has increased the concerns about the amount of personal data being recorded.

The average person in Britain makes three cell phone calls and sends at least two text messages.

Cell phone services log information about who was called and the caller’s geographic location and direction of travel, this is computed triangulation from cell phone towers.

People can also have their locations recorded even when they are not using their phones, since cell phones send out unique signals at regular intervals.

Internet service providers record information on customers whenever they use the internet, including name, address and IP address, as well as browser type and location information.

Internet service providers also record people’s email useage.

Store “loyalty” cards record shopping information on people who use them. They link people’s personal information to the stores used, the purchase times and the amount of money spent.

Banks also record large amounts of information on people.

They also provide personal data to credit agencies, debt collectors and fraud prevention departments.

Debit and credit card use can provide information on purchases and locations.

The largest amount of surveillance in Britain is through the network of CCTV surveillance cameras used in public. A person will appear on 300 CCTV cameras during an average day in Britain and those surveillance tapes are kept by many departments for an indefinite period of time.

Britain now has more public surveillance cameras than any other nation in the world. It is estimated that there are more than 4.2 million surveillance cameras in the U.K.

A new use for CCTV recordings is the use of automatic number plate recognition systems, which read number-plates and search databases for signs that a vehicle has been used in crime.

A national automatic number plate recognition system is maintained by the Association of Chief Police Officers. Every number plate recorded by the system is stored in a database with date, time and location for two years.

Travel passes also reveal large amounts of information about people. When they are registered to a person’s name, they record travel history, dates and time.

Companies are increasingly using radio frequency security passes for employees, providing them with information about when staff enter and leave the building.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Governments and businesses are using thousands of video surveillance cameras in an effort to monitor and deter terrorists and criminals, but innocent everyday citizens get caught on tape too.

However, a new type of privacy software for surveillance cameras may correct that problem, by blurring the faces of innocent people in the footage unless there’s an incident or an official investigation. Some of the same companies that made video surveillance so popular are now working to make the surveillance networks more privacy-friendly for innocent citizens.

Video-analysis company 3VR uses software to build databases of every vehicle, license plate and person its surveillance networks monitor and then triggers an alarm when a suspicious person or car is caught on camera.

3VR’s software engineers are now modifying their algorithms to blur out the faces and vehicles that don’t trip the software’s alarms.

A security guard or investigator would have the ability to later remove the blur from the faces, with the proper key (or a subpoena) if there is a legitimate reason to do so. The blurring software is simply a way to stop voyeuristic security guards from using surveillance cameras for their own personal entertainment.

Watch the YouTube video below to see an example of the blurring surveillance software.

Source: Wired News

Passenger airlines could be the next place where surveillance cameras are used to monitor people.

A new European surveillance system uses multiple cameras and software that tried to detect terrorists or other dangers caused by people on an aircraft.

The European Union’s Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment project uses a camera mounted on every passenger seat and six wide-angle surveillance cameras to monitor the aisles. Software then analyses the footage to detect possible terrorist activity or “air-rage” incidents, by recording people’s facial expressions.

The new surveillance system has reportedly performed well in tests last January that simulated terrorist and troublesome passenger behavior situations on a fake passenger plane.

The new surveillance software must deal with the challenging environment of a full plane cabin.

As people move around they often obscure one another, causing a risk the computer will lose track of some of the hundreds of people it must monitor on a plane. To work around this, the surveillance software constantly matches views of people from different cameras to track and monitor their activity.

Varying suspicious movements and behaviors and combinations of both can trigger the system.

Much of the software’s ability to recognize threats relies on sensitive information gathered from the intelligence community.

However, the new surveillance system will require thousands of tests on everyday people in different situations before it can be used reliably for detecting threats on passenger airlines.

Source: ABC News