Privacy preserving surveillance and the tracking-paradox

Increasing capabilities of intelligent video surveillance systems impose new threats to privacy while, at the same time, offering opportunities for reducing the privacy invasiveness of surveillance measures as well as their selectivity. We show that aggregating more data about observed people does not necessarily lead to less privacy, but can increase the selectivity of surveillance measures. In case of video surveillance in a company environment, if we enable the system to authenticate employees and to know their current positions, we can ensure that no data about employees leaves the surveillance system, i.e., is being visualized or made accessible to an operator. In contrast, due to their lack of computer vision intelligence, conventional video surveillance systems do by design treat each person's privacy equally, independent of whether one has to spend the whole work day under surveillance (e.g. personnel of an airport) or occasionally a limited amount of time (e.g. air passengers). We conceive our approach towards improving the selectivity of video surveillance measures as an interpretation of the principle of proportionality in law.