Feasibility Study on CCTV-aware Routing and Navigation for Privacy, Anonymity, and Safety. Jyvaskyla -- Case-study of the First City to Benefit from CCTV-aware Technology. (Preprint)
This study addresses the problem of privacy invasion by CCTV cameras for individuals seeking to preserve their anonymity, demonstrating the significant trade-off between privacy and route efficiency.
This paper investigates the feasibility of a CCTV-aware routing and navigation system to enhance privacy and safety. They mapped 450 CCTV cameras in Jyvaskyla, Finland, and found that privacy-preserving routes increased walking distance by 1.5x with low-performance cameras and 5.0x with medium-to-high performance cameras, with some routes having no privacy options.
In order to withstand the ever-increasing invasion of privacy by CCTV cameras and technologies, on par CCTV-aware solutions must exist that provide privacy, safety, and cybersecurity features. We argue that a first important step towards such CCTV-aware solutions must be a mapping system that provides both privacy and safety routing and navigation options. To the best of our knowledge, there are no mapping nor navigation systems that support privacy and safety routing options. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a CCTV-aware routing and navigation solution. The aim of this feasibility exploration is to understand what are the main impacts of CCTV on privacy, and what are the challenges and benefits to building such technology. We evaluate our approach on seven (7) pedestrian walking routes within the downtown area of the city of Jyvaskyla, Finland. We first map a total of 450 CCTV cameras, and then experiment with routing and navigation under several different configurations to coarsely model the possible cameras' parameters and coverage from the real-world. We report two main results. First, our preliminary findings support the overall feasibility of our approach. Second, the results also reveal a data-driven worrying reality for persons wishing to preserve their privacy/anonymity as their main living choice. When modelling cameras at their low performance end, a privacy-preserving route has on average a 1.5x distance increase when compared to generic routing. When modelling cameras at their medium-to-high performance end, a privacy-preserving route has on average a 5.0x distance increase, while in some cases there are no privacy-preserving routes possible at all. These results further support and encourage both global mapping of CCTV cameras and refinements to camera modelling and underlying technology.