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by Jon_Lowtek
2242 days ago
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Mannheim is running a "pilot project" called "Mannheimer Weg". It is video surveillance + behavior analysis. The german state of Baden-Würtenberg, where Mannheim is located, has already announced to expand "intelligent video surveillance" to other large cities, starting with Heidelberg this year and focusing on central train and tram stations. There are many sources in german about this topic, some praising it, some are more critical. Another such "pilot project" is run at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof and that one got a lot more bad feedback, because they also "try" facial recognition and tracking smart phone signals. It should be noted that the european union invested into this technology starting with the 7th Framework Programm in 2007 under the codenames INDECT, ADABTS and SAMURAI. Expect to be flagged for "abnormal, possibly criminal behaviour" in the future if you run or loiter at a large train station. |
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In Darmstadt the central tram hub "Luisenplatz" is going to get modern video surveillance, too. Bought from Dallmeier Electronic GmbH & Co. KG. The mayor said no facial regocnition is planned, even if the vendor offers integration with such systems. Its unknown if advanced behavior analysis is included. It is likely that all cities buy from different vendors and may get very different quality of automated video content analysis.
In Hannover the local police veiled their own cameras last year during a demonstration against a new police law. The demonstration asked for that and announced to go to a court and the police just complied without waiting for a court order, as they wanted to show clearly that they are not interested in filming and (possibly) personally identifying their political opposition. When the city council in Darmstadt was asked for such a rule for the soon to be installed cameras, they laughed and said both the police and the interior intelligence agency can and will request demonstrations to be filmed on a case by case basis and the people will not be told if the cameras are on or off.
Germany's federal police (BKA) and ministry of interior security ("Ministerium für Staatssicherheit") are unhappy with these fragmented and diversified solutions. They aim for a networked system that can find people nation wide on any camera using biometric recognition when a search warrant is issued.
In the meantime Deutsche Bahn is experimenting with a "facial anti-recognition feature" that replaces faces with fakes because they believe they can easier share the data with third party data anaylsis providers if they do that.