Privacy Preserving Surveillance and the Tracking Paradox

Simon Greiner, Pascal Birnstill, Erik Krempel, Bernhard Beckert, and Jürgen Beyerer


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.