Selling security, delivering anxiety: The rise of home surveillance cameras

Summer reissue: Why do so many of us install security cameras – and are they breaching other people’s rights?

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Pixelated, fish-eyed and taken from a high angle. There’s the front doormat, warped porch rafters, the footpath beyond a fence, and a stranger. Security camera images have an aesthetic that makes people look inherently suspicious, and they’re popping up on community Facebook groups with increasing frequency. Usually the posts accompanying them say things like “beware, this person stole my package” or “Please PM me if you have any info on this person”. Sometimes it’s “an uninvited nocturnal prowler” or “a reminder to stay vigilant”. Having a camera has emboldened some of us to become small-time neighbourhood cops.

These posts are symptomatic of a larger trend. Surveillance should no longer be thought of as the domain of a big brother state, but rather of Karen down the road. Our neighbourhoods are more heavily surveilled than ever before, and that surveillance is virtually unregulated because it’s being done by individuals as opposed to companies or organisations that are regulated under the Privacy Act. Gary Morrison, CEO of the New Zealand Security Association, says there has been a marked increase in the accessibility of low-cost home surveillance cameras, and because many are bought through retailers that don’t have to be licensed (which isn’t required unless they’re installing cameras or advising on security), sales data isn’t compiled anywhere. One of those retailers, Bunnings, confirms a growing interest for home security products including cameras, alarm systems, digital door locks and networking devices, says the company’s New Zealand head of trading, Victoria Anderson. There are 65 products in the Security Cameras & Accessories tab on the Bunnings website, with the cheapest camera $52. Geeks on Wheels, a company that has been helping people with technology in their homes for two decades, told The Spinoff that interest in residential security cameras here has lagged behind the US and Australia, but is rising steadily – most notably in the past two to three years. They attribute the rise partially to cheaper options becoming easily available. 

Now, as I stroll inner-city Auckland neighbourhoods, I look out for security cameras. They’re there, tucked into the eaves, pointing outwards from houses. It’s easy to miss them, or assume they’re a light. Walking past, you might not realise you’re on camera. How far they can see depends on individual cameras but most can see four to 30 metres away which is usually beyond the fenceline and into neighbouring properties or public areas. Some can tilt and rotate. Others are mounted to fences or by gates, pointing directly out of the property. Many will be able to record neighbours coming and going, children walking to school, couriers delivering packages, cars driving by, cyclists in their wake and other ordinary, everyday happenings. The people going about their daily lives probably aren’t cognisant that they’re being watched and recorded. No agency keeps track of how many there are, but two years ago the NZ Herald estimated a total of 400,000 cameras were surveilling New Zealand at residential, commercial and government sites.

People install cameras for a variety of reasons. They may want to keep tabs on deliveries, communicate with visitors through in-built speakers if it’s difficult for them to get to the door, or keep an eye on their pets while they’re out. But usually cameras are bought as a security measure. Their rising popularity comes at the same time we’re feeling increasingly concerned about becoming victims of crime and are regularly warned about rising crime rates.

Sarah* installed cameras at her Christchurch property a little over a year ago, almost as soon as she and her partner moved in. They’d known the house had been robbed before and “it kind of freaked me out”, says Sarah, who adds that her neighbourhood is “not flash” and she wanted “that extra layer of protection”. Later she found out that the robbery wasn’t quite what she had imagined – it was opportunistic, with someone gaining access when the windows had been left open rather than a forceful break-in. Now, she’s not sure if the cameras are providing security or peace of mind.

When it comes to surveillance cameras in public spaces, there’s evidence that they frighten people rather than reassure them. Commentators in the US have said companies making and selling security devices are selling fear and paranoia, rather than safety, by painting the world and other people as hostile and potentially dangerous. Cameras capture events that aren’t necessarily dangerous, but can be unsettling – things that could easily make someone more fearful about living in their own community.

Sarah’s cameras caught strangers on their property a few months after she installed them. On a summer night around midnight, the back garden camera was triggered. When she looked at the footage the next morning, Sarah saw two men scaling the fence, then rummaging through the woodshed and trying to get into the garage before walking out through the driveway. “It was such a horrible feeling knowing that I was sleeping and there were just these two random dudes walking through the property,” she says. Sometimes, when she is home alone and hears a noise outside, she logs into the live camera to have a look. “That really freaks you out, because it’s this creepy night vision,” she says. So far it’s been nothing, and she ends up wondering if she is paranoid.

“I don’t even know if having cameras is good or worse, if it actually adds to my anxiety,” says Sarah. She’s decided to turn off the automatic notifications the system sends when it detects movement. “I’d jump every time my doorbell cam went off, every time I had a notification, and then it’s a cat.” She says receiving notifications is “a horrible feeling” and even if you see something, “you can’t do anything. The only thing you could do is talk through your camera, you could be like, ‘Hey, get out of there, mate.’”

There’s a passivity to surveillance. Inherently it means watching, not stopping or intervening. Many intrusions are filmed when camera owners are out of town, at work, or sleeping. Often the videos are seen after the fact, so there’s little anyone could have done to change what happened. Sarah says her cameras are “potentially a deterrent – when you walk past our camera, it clicks and the light turns on. I suppose if I was in someone’s garden it might put me off, but I could also think ‘I’ve got my hood up. My face is hidden’.”

Where  the cameras are most helpful at the moment is in keeping “non-creepy” tabs on her partner, says Sarah – mostly so she knows if she needs to go home and feed the dog. Sometimes these tabs don’t work in Sarah’s favour. “The worst part of that is that when she’s away, I always get takeout and she messages me, ‘You got pizza again,’ says Sarah. “I can’t even get a sneaky fucking pizza any more.”

While with Sarah and her partner it’s just light-hearted ribbing, cameras can be used to track, spy on and control household members. This is a pertinent possibility in New Zealand, given we have extremely high rates of family and intimate partner violence. Overseas, research shows perpetrators of domestic abuse are increasingly exploiting digital tools, and there are concerns that internet-connected smart home devices – including surveillance – provide perpetrators with a wider and more sophisticated range of tools to harm victims.

Theoretically, cameras could help or provide reassurance for victims, but the problem is who has access to and control over the devices. A victim in the UK knew she was being tracked with a doorbell camera, but couldn’t do anything about it. “I could take the battery out of it if I wanted to, but I didn’t feel like I could because he would say to me, ‘You’re compromising our children’s safety’,” she told the BBC. It’s usually the perpetrator who sets up and manages the devices.  They could disguise the device’s abilities, so the victim would be unaware they’re being monitored, or they may say a device has functionality that it does not have, in order to intimidate and frighten. Other studies have shown that abusers sometimes use technology to be constantly present in a victim’s life, making them feel like they have no privacy or safety.

Over the last year the Office of Privacy Commissioner has received more than 150 complaints and inquiries about the use of surveillance cameras. The bulk of these were from neighbours – people concerned about other people’s cameras capturing footage of their own homes and the footpaths. “People feel we should be able to do something about it. They feel that their privacy has been intruded on,” says acting privacy commissioner Liz MacPherson. “But the fact is that the Privacy Act doesn’t really apply to what somebody does in their personal capacity, except in a really narrow range of circumstances.”

The design of the Privacy Act has its origins in concepts of privacy that centre on a person having the right to be left alone, and to be safe and secure and private within their own home, says MacPherson. By that design it focuses on holding agencies accountable for the way they collect, use and disclose information, and it recognises that individuals have reasons for collecting information on their own property. The threshold for the state or regulator getting involved in what an individual person is doing on their property is set high for this reason.

When cameras are owned and operated by individual people, the Privacy Act comes into play only when what they capture would be highly offensive to a reasonable person. MacPherson cites training a camera on a bathroom or bedroom window, where it could capture sensitive or intimate images, as possible examples. But even if that threshold is met, “there’s really no complaint or remedy process”, she says. “People complain about this a lot.” There’s no plan to change or amend the act. She suggests there are cases where the use of home surveillance cameras may be better covered by the Crimes Act (intimate recordings without consent), Summary Offences Act (peering into windows) or the Harmful Digital Communications Act (recordings put online).

Still, people go to the Office of Privacy Commissioner with their privacy concerns. That’s why there’s a section of its website dedicated to laws and guidelines on the use of CCTV or surveillance cameras at home, which starts by suggesting installing lights and alarms instead. Then it’s talking to neighbours before installation, pointing the cameras only at key areas, putting up signs so people know the cameras are there, providing footage when neighbours or police ask for it, and deleting footage automatically and quickly. MacPherson sums up the advice as a “creepy test” – if you were talking about your cameras at the pub, and someone overheard you, would they think your setup was creepy?

While not many people would set out to be creepy “it’s very easy to just slap up a whole bunch of cameras”, says Monique Mann, a researcher at Te Herenga Waka working on new surveillance technologies and their human rights, environmental and social justice impacts. The way cameras are set up should be specifically tailored to an aim, rather than surveilling widely without consideration, says Mann, and she would like to see the “creepy test” tightened into more stringent requirements and actual regulations – restricting recording to within someone’s own property and limiting the time recordings can be stored would be a start. Recording sound should be considered for regulation too, she says, as it has the potential to be more invasive than images and videos. 

But trying to regulate hundreds of thousands of cameras run by individual people throughout the country raises questions of enforceability. We don’t even know how many there are, let alone where. When Mann began researching surveillance a decade ago, it was its use in law enforcement that drew her in. Facial recognition was limited to passports and border control. Now it’s everywhere, including at the supermarket and on people’s phones. In this context she says models of privacy protection, typically notice and consent, are failing. If you’re walking past a house, there’s rarely an opportunity to be notified and to consent. Signs (“Smile, you’re on camera”) exist but aren’t mandatory. When there are cameras canvassing the streets and at the places you need to go to buy food, “you can’t opt out of this, unless maybe you wrap a blanket around your head”.

It’s not just the people walking past, living next door or delivering packages who should be concerned about privacy. If there are cameras installed around your home, you’re who they’re going to capture the most footage of. When Amy* moved into her new Auckland home three years ago, it had a “hardcore” but “outdated” network of security cameras. Amy’s neighbour, head of the neighbourhood watch, warned Amy that the area was “really crime heavy” – every fortnight, the neighbourhood watch circulates a spreadsheet of crimes in the area. Suitably spooked, Amy decided to get new surveillance cameras, even though it was expensive, that were wifi connected and used AI to detect human motions and then begin recording. Videos are uploaded onto the cloud where they can be viewed through an app. Amy says they have an account to view the recordings, but she’s never considered where the data is stored or if it’s encrypted or secure. Most of the time, the videos they capture feature Amy and her partner coming and going from the house and gardening. “They’re just very funny videos,” says Amy – her with the weedwacker in purple gumboots, her partner cutting across the berm, Amy leaving in the dark for the gym. In one notable instance, one camera caught a stray kitten on their fence.

Mann’s research has shown that while most people say they’re concerned about their privacy, they tend not to read terms of service or technical specifications, and if they do, they don’t fully understand them. She sent me a link to a website where a grid of grainy videos greets you. All have that familiar aesthetic: pixelated, fisheye, high angle. Insecam is a directory of unsecured online surveillance cameras that streams videos live from around the world and can be searched by location, camera manufacturer, or by popularity. In a relieving testament to visitors of the site, the most popular camera is one pointing at the inside of a Japanese giant flying squirrel’s nesting box. Six New Zealand cameras feature on the site: one is of a paddock in Palmerston North, one is of a beach in Porirua and another claims to be in Auckland, but is definitely in Queenstown.

Insecam is not necessarily nefarious, but there are cases of baby monitors being hacked, and the hacker speaking through them. Mann is tentative – she doesn’t want to “sound really paranoid” – but notes that surveillance systems don’t simply record images, they can collect data. They can analyse information over time – identifying patterns, movements and routines. This information is somewhere on the cloud, and the people collecting it rarely consider if it’s secure. Revelations about data breaches and vulnerabilities are a regular occurrence. It’s a responsibility she doesn’t think should fall so heavily on the consumer. “I think there’s a greater role here for state agencies, particularly in relation to companies and manufacturers of not only cameras, but devices more broadly.” She thinks there should be requirements around security practices and the encryption of data.

When it comes to the more deliberate dissemination of specific footage  – ie those images that are appearing in community Facebook groups or elsewhere on social media – people “should be very careful”, says MacPherson of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. “We would always advise against posting images that have been collected of people without their consent or knowledge,” she says. As well as privacy, there’s defamation to worry about when images are being published alongside allegations of dodgy behaviour. A recording of a person on someone else’s property may seem to you like evidence of crime, but perhaps they’re a neighbour relocating your package to the back of your house. They may be lost, or looking for a lost pet. A child may have kicked a ball over the fence. Maybe they just want a better look at your lovely windows. 

Suspicious behaviour is in the eye of the beholder, and if anyone can accuse someone of a crime without going through the proper channels, racism and other prejudices can go unchecked. In the US, an app that acts as a virtual neighbourhood watch has people disproportionately posting surveillance footage depicting people of colour, and descriptions often use racist language or make racist assumptions. A video posted in January 2019 shows six young people of colour walking up a stairwell, titled “6 gang members going to the roofs”. It isn’t hard to imagine similar assumptions happening here. 

Even if you do have what you believe to be firm video evidence of a crime, taking the law into your own hands is not advised – and the legal punishment for stealing a package doesn’t include public shaming. “We would strongly encourage homeowners, just as we would encourage businesses, to use the lawful means available to them to play catch’em,” says MacPherson. “Don’t post them on your community Facebook page, go to the police.”

Community policing manager Soni Malaulau says the increase in home and personal security cameras has been “helpful for police in terms of helping identifying people and piecing together incidents”, but being caught on camera isn’t always enough. “Police require a certain standard of evidential sufficiency,” he notes – footage will be just one part of a case, and, presumably, walking down a driveway isn’t a crime. A better, but rare, example might be in the investigations of Renee Duckmanton’s murder. When the Christchurch woman’s body was found in 2016, police traced her last movements, and found her killer through trawling the footage of dozens of security cameras on houses, shops, businesses and buses. 

At that point, police would have gone knocking door to door to ask for footage. Two years later Michelle Hohepa, a web developer in a neighbourhood support role for Auckland’s Māngere Bridge community, became a contact person for police when they needed footage in the area – they would call her regularly to ask if she knew anyone with cameras in an area where a crime had been committed, she told the NZ Herald in 2022. Then one night inspiration struck – “I thought ‘I’m just going to build them a website so they don’t have to keep bugging me’.” The result was  Community Cam, where people can register their cameras so that police can see where cameras are and are provided the contact details of who owns them. Camera owners can upload footage through the site, where police, and nobody else, can access it.

As for Amy, in the three years she has had her new, expensive camera set-up, she’s been robbed once. A scooter, parked out of the cameras’ lines of sight, was stolen from the driveway. The cameras also once captured an unknown man walking up their driveway, then Amy’s dog, Stevie, barking and the man turning around and leaving. She sent the footage to the police, who told her they would log it. She was slightly frustrated they couldn’t or didn’t do more. It would perhaps have been more satisfying to post it online and have neighbours share her outrage and worry – she might have felt a sense of justice. But, as Amy notes, he hadn’t actually done anything. “He was just being suspicious.” Capturing him on camera seems to have served no real purpose. Perhaps it would have been preferable not to know he was ever there.

First published July 16, 2024.