Hundreds Of Cameras Now Monitor Pedestrians And Movement Tracking

This is the kind of stuff that China does: Fury as traffic flow cameras are secretly switched to monitor millions of pedestrians in UK government-backed secret Corona project

Strange Sounds

Big Brother is watching you!

Millions of people are being monitored for social distancing as part of a government-backed project secretly rolled out across Britain, the Mail can reveal.

In what campaigners call a sign the country is heading to a ‘truly dark place’, at least 363 cameras originally installed to monitor traffic flow have been switched – without public consultation – to snoop on pedestrians.

An investigation revealed that Vivacity Labs, the company behind the Artificial Intelligence camera technology, was awarded almost £50,000 by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy [BEIS] in June to ‘improve the collection of social distancing data.’

The brief from public body Innovate UK – funded by BEIS – said pedestrians in 16 cities would be monitored for how close they are to one another in public places to ‘help the Government plan the removal of lockdown measures’.

Despite the widespread and potentially life-changing use of the data, pedestrians have remained unaware their movements are being tracked because neither the Government nor many of the councils who approved the installation of cameras consulted the public on their change of use.

In an interview last month, Mark Nicholson, one of Vivacity’s founders, said the technology could soon be expanded to carry out temperature checks ‘depending on how far down the ‘Big Brother’ route we want to go’.+3

Former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said last night: ‘This is the kind of stuff that China does.

‘We are losing our inalienable freedoms. Covid is destroying the very nature of what it is to be in a democracy under the rule of law and protected freedoms. The authorities are now using devices [to monitor people] which were not intended for that purpose. The Government should have informed the public but they shouldn’t be doing this in the first place.‘

‘Sensors we’re told are for monitoring traffic are later used to monitor social distancing, and surely no one is naive enough to think that it’ll end there. You have to draw a line somewhere.

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