https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKgdSsnZn7wCities and corporations are stringing up thousands and thousands of surveillance cameras, armed with advanced video intelligence algorithms, to watch out for terrorists and crooks. Too bad the rest of us get caught on tape, while the electronic eyes make their spy sweeps. And no one knows what the spycams are recording.

A strain of new software may have the potential to change that, however, by blurring or encrypting faces in the footage, until there's an alarm or an investigation. Ironically, some of the same firms that made video surveillance extra Orwellian are now working to make the spy networks a bit more privacy-friendly.

Take video-analysis company 3VR. Its software builds up databases of every vehicle, license plate and face a surveillance network sees – yikes – and triggers an alarm when a suspect person or car crosses a camera's lens.

Now, 3VR's engineers are tweaking the algorithms to blur out all the faces and vehicles that don't fall under the software's suspicions so the rest of us aren't filmed just because we happen to be walking by the wrong place at the wrong time.

A pair of University of Toronto professors have put together a similar system, a "secure visual object coding application" that "uses cryptography techniques to encrypt 'objects of interest' within video frames – faces or other features that may be used to identify a person – and store them separately."

Of course, a security guard or investigator could later unecrypt the faces, with the proper key (or a subpoena). So a person wouldn't know for sure he was hidden from the cameras forvever. But at least the decrypting would be an auditable event – something a supervisor (or a judge) could track. The boss or magistrate could tell whether the monitor jockey wanted to see a robber's getaway, or a woman's legs. 3VR chief Stephen Russell writes on his blog, it's "a way to 'watch the watchers,' if you will."

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