Problem: Male Operators Use Surveillance Cameras For Ogling Women; Mayor's Solution: Employ Only Female Operators

from the missing-the-point dept

Lo Barnechea is a commune of Chile located in Santiago Province, with a population of about 75,000. Its Mayor, Felipe Guevara, has decided what Lo Barnechea really needs is a massive surveillance system installed in aerostats tethered over the area, as explained by a post on the Derechos Digitales site (original in Spanish.) It's not clear from the article why he chose this unusual approach; perhaps it's because most of his district is mountainous, and that poses problems for conventional surveillance systems. Whatever the reasons, Guevara is smart enough to recognize that powerful mass surveillance systems of the kind he wants to install, which involves cameras able to pick out people from a distance of more than a kilometer away, have a serious problem: The mayor explains that in a surveillance system implemented in Argentina, the operators started to use the cameras to follow women in the streets. That might have alerted him to the larger issue here: the fact that there will always be a temptation to abuse such powerful systems. But no, Guevara is undeterred, because he believes he has come up with a way to avoid this issue: The mayor's unusual solution: to employ women, because "they are less voyeuristic, more discreet" than men." Or maybe they are so discreet, they just get away with it...

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Filed Under: chile, felipe guevara, lo barnechea, men, santiago province, surveillance, women