The goal of this planning grant proposal is to study how data obtained by members of the public through camera pictures, video feeds and similar technology can be used to improve public safety without unduly infringing on personal rights such as privacy. To date, this effort has been driven by governments, through CCTV and similar technology, or private companies, through devices such as doorbell cameras. In contrast, this proposal will focus on how public safety can be enhanced through the use of data that are obtained and contributed voluntarily by individuals and are publicly maintained. For example, individuals might choose to capture the license plate identifiers of the automobiles that drive through their streets. The community might then agree to share this information with policing agencies seeking to track down stolen vehicles, reckless driving, or other criminal activities. As these examples illustrate, this arrangement raises significant questions about surveillance, trust, and privacy. This project aims to study these issues from multiple perspectives—technological, historical, and legal—with the aim of developing a workable and publicly vetted approach to concerns around privacy and public safety raised by recent commercial and technological developments.

This proposal addresses a new and burgeoning phenomenon. Closed circuit TV and public webcams have been available for decades, and people have used cell phone cameras on a massive scale for at least a decade. Much newer, however, is the increasing integration of such sensor capabilities in a wider set of environments, such as doorbell cameras. Newer still is the idea that this integration could be crowdsourced to the public rather than controlled by private companies. This project will study these societal issues from the following perspectives: (1) technology, including a survey of low-cost embedded devices that are suitable for collecting, encrypting, transmitting, and storing data from personally accessible devices; (2) data privacy, in which this project will appraise the protocols that might manage how these data are secured, stored, and kept private, including a characterization of anonymization methodologies; (3) historical, in which this project will review and analyze past episodes of public data collection and public safety, with the aim of determining how this history can provide guides for our current work; (4) legal, including a review of various state and federal statutes, as well as Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, with the goal of analyzing how the law might govern this type of information collection and storage; (5) safety, where this project will address the effect public data collection and dissemination of the type proposed can have on public safety.