Inclusive Privacy Consenting in Public Video Surveillance and Future Directions

Mainstream public video-surveillance systems are not generally designed to provide accommodations for under-privileged and under-represented subjects [1, 2]. These subjects comprise of physically-challenged individuals, visually-impaired people and senior-citizens. With the recent emergence of the GDPR act [3, 4], all surveillance data subjects, including these under-served populations, need to be offered an opportunity to provide consent, according to the Opt-in and Opt-out rule, regarding being recorded on closed-circuit televisions (CCTV) and other security cameras. Research advances in privacy-enhancing innovations [5, 6], and privacy-mediating features [6, 7] have helped visual-surveillance systems evolve towards offering more subject-centric privacy consenting options. However, these present state-of-the-art technologies do not account for the under-served people. In order to be more inclusive in its privacy-mediating design, a video surveillance system needs to address the difficulties posed by technologies to the under-served subjects. In this article, we discuss this potential gap in research work, and explore the need of designing more inclusive privacy consenting functionalities within video-surveillance systems.