OSRM-CCTV: Open-source CCTV-aware routing and navigation system for privacy, anonymity and safety (Preprint)
This addresses privacy concerns for individuals navigating areas with CCTV cameras, though it is an incremental step as it builds on existing routing systems.
The paper tackles the problem of widespread CCTV surveillance by introducing OSRM-CCTV, the first routing and navigation system that incorporates CCTV awareness to provide privacy, anonymity, and safety options, and validates it with synthetic and real-world examples.
For the last several decades, the increased, widespread, unwarranted, and unaccountable use of Closed-Circuit TeleVision (CCTV) cameras globally has raised concerns about privacy risks. Additional recent features of many CCTV cameras, such as Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based facial recognition, only increase concerns among privacy advocates. Therefore, on par \emph{CCTV-aware solutions} must exist that provide privacy, safety, and cybersecurity features. We argue that an important step forward is to develop solutions addressing privacy concerns via routing and navigation systems (e.g., OpenStreetMap, Google Maps) that provide both privacy and safety options for areas where cameras are known to be present. However, at present no routing and navigation system, whether online or offline, provide corresponding CCTV-aware functionality. In this paper we introduce OSRM-CCTV -- the first and only CCTV-aware routing and navigation system designed and built for privacy, anonymity and safety applications. We validate and demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of the system on a handful of synthetic and real-world examples. To help validate our work as well as to further encourage the development and wide adoption of the system, we release OSRM-CCTV as open-source.