As our world has become increasingly instrumented and surveilled, a common refrain has been that more data can help us make better decisions. The problem is that data alone is not informative. It must be interpreted and contextualized in order to impart meaning. The rise of home medical tests are deluging people with medical insights, but without the experience and training of a medical professional, they can easily misinterpret results and take actions that make their health far worse. Similarly, doorbell camera networks are increasingly turning society into an army of armchair detectives, replacing trained law enforcement professionals with crowdsourced policing. As this transition intensifies, its growing pains remind us of the dangers of data without understanding.
Internet-connected home surveillance camera networks have exploded in popularity over the last few years, ushered in by rapidly falling prices, simple installation and extensive marketing campaigns emphasizing their ability to deter and document crime.
At the same time, the wave of always-on cameras sweeping across residential America is flooding homeowners with the innocuous real-time comings and goings around their homes that have always been there, but they simply never noticed before. Armed with a firehose of data, but lacking the experience and expertise to understand what they are seeing, homeowners see crime at every turn, leading to a rise in false alerts and discriminatory demographic profiling.
The average homeowner, even if they work from home, is blissfully unaware of the myriad incursions across their property line that happen every day, from utility workers and city contractors to wildlife and neighborhood joggers. The deer munching at the bushes, the early morning jogger on the sidewalk, the utility worker reading the backyard meter, the city contractor inspecting a utility pole: all of these ordinary daily activities are largely invisible to the public.
Today however, that same homeowner may be armed with a phalanx of cloud-connected cameras standing sentinel over their property, sending them a real-time alert with footage of every jogger than passes by 24/7/365. Suddenly every pedestrian is a potential criminal, with their every mannerism and item of clothing carefully scrutinized.
From blissful ignorance to hypervigilance, homeowners are now deluged with the everyday things they never noticed before, convinced every alert is an early warning of a burglary to happen.
The problem is that security cameras provide homeowners with a rich new source of raw data without helping them understand and interpret it. A camera alerting to a stranger on the porch could be flagging anything from a delivery person to a home invader, but it leaves that determination to the untrained homeowner fearing the worst. The very concept of watching someone through a camera conjures up imagery of a castle defense in the typical person, the idea that whatever they are observing is likely to be a threat. After all, the only experience most of the public has with such imagery is when they see it on the news or in movies being used to document crime. Thus, we become preconditioned to see the camera-captured world as threatening in a way we would not if we were standing in the front lawn in person.
Cameras strip away the context necessary to interpret their imagery, making it difficult to see a delivery person’s uniform or a utility truck parked out front. The narrow slice of reality they capture requires interpretative skills few members of the public possess.
In short, cameras deluge their owners with data that lacks sufficient context to allow accurate interpretation and for which those owners do not possess the skills or experience to understand. The vast majority of what the cameras capture are the mundane everyday property line incursions that define daily life, but for homeowners just becoming aware of a world they have never seen before, all of this data can easily lead them astray.
Perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from the rise of doorbell camera networks is that it is not enough for companies to just sell cameras, they must also help their users understand what those cameras are showing them.
In the end, the digital world is deluging us with ever more data arriving ever faster, but it isn’t equipping us with the tools to make sense of it all, to separate fact from “fake news” fiction and to understand what is meaningful and what is merely noise.
