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Innovation

Surv aims to map every surveillance camera in the world

Walk along any major street and it's likely a number of surveillance cameras, mounted outside buildings and street lights, are watching you. An app under development tells you where they are.
Written by Kirsten Korosec, Contributor

Walk along any major street in the world's largest cities and it's likely a number of surveillance cameras, mounted outside buildings and on street lights, are watching you.

Mobile software designers Kaza Razat and Khalid Mills have built an app, which is still closed for beta, that aims to show the location of every outdoor surveillance cameras within 100 meters of your smartphone (hat tip, Fast Company).

The long-time collaborators launched a Kickstarter campaign this week to raise $25,000 to develop the app from its current beta version to a more polished 1.0 version that can be released to the public, according to Surv's Kickstarter site.

The company's beta version has been approved by Apple and will be available in the app store once it's further developed and legal issues are addressed.

Surv works by collecting crowdsourced data about outdoor surveillance cameras. The camera's coordinates, description and a photo are uploaded by users. Once the app is installed on your iPhone, you'll be able to see all of the cameras that have been uploaded within 100 meters of your current location.

Privacy fears weren't the driving force behind the creation of the app. Surv's developers say they're not on neither side of the security versus privacy debate. Instead, they want to empower the public as well as aid in investigations. From Surv:

In global cities public surveillance is a fact of life. The question is are there other, socially beneficial uses for the cameras and the massive amount of footage they record.

Here is a video from Surv that provides more detail about app.

Photo: Surv

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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