Privacy protected with new surveillance technology. (Image: 3VR)

MANY people are unhappy about being filmed by CCTV in case the footage is used against them in some way. Now a surveillance technology company has come up with a method of scrambling the images of anyone in CCTV film who is not a suspect.

3VR, based in San Francisco, says it should reassure members of the public who do not wish to be identifiable to police or lawyers, or even TV crime-stopper shows.

The technology uses 3VR’s recently patented face-recognition algorithms to home in on known faces in crowds. An image-scrambling …