Sitting in a restaurant with a friend recently, I asked a simple question: How many cameras are in this place? He looked up and immediately pointed out several hemispherical domes in the ceiling, scattered around the restaurant. He identified the surveillance cameras and confidently guessed “about 10” — but he had fallen right into my trap. What about the cell phone cameras, I asked? He frowned as we upped the count to likely north of 50, when considering the camera-phone-bearing customers and employees. At that moment, if a customer were to try to sneak off with a pastry, steal someone’s wallet or go on an epic rant about the price of an extra scoop of guacamole, there were dozens of people at the ready to document it. Any misstep could turn into an online reputation issue within moments. And this is true not just at a Panera Bread in Florida but nearly every restaurant and retail store in the United States. Whether we like it or not, we are being watched.
200 Million Camera Phones
According to analysts, there will be more than 200 million camera phones in the United States by 2017. (The U.S. population is around 320 million, by the way.) We have about 50 million surveillance cameras in America, and that number is likely growing at a rapid clip as the prices for such devices fall, and they become easy to monitor with web-based technology.Read More
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