YOUNG people do not care about their privacy and there is little reason to protect it, according to the former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon.

They use Twitter and Facebook, she said. They appear on Big Brother. There has been a generational shift.

''Young people don't seem to be bothered,'' she said at last night's IQ2 debate, organised by the St James Ethics Centre and sponsored by the Herald. ''These arguments about protecting people's privacy: in many cases people don't care about their privacy being protected.''

But the debate, based around the proposition ''Better more cameras than more crime'', centred not so much on the principles of privacy as it did on whether or not CCTV cameras worked in reducing crime.

The affirmative said they did. Speaking for the opposition, Paul Wilson, who was chief investigator on the largest evidence-based CCTV research program conducted in Australia, said they aided in detection for only a handful of crimes in his research: a man urinating on a beach, a man running naked, someone gesturing with two fingers behind a police officer.