Could cameras make for better parents?
How about this sign in your living room?
If you like the idea of governmental CCTV in your home, you might want to think about moving to London. Charlie Sorrel, writing for Wired’s Gadget Lab, has an outraged post today about Britain’s plan to put cameras in the homes of 20,000 families:
As an ex-Brit, I’m well aware of the authorities’ love of surveillance and snooping, but even I, a pessimistic cynic, am amazed by the governments latest plan: to install Orwell’s telescreens in 20,000 homes.
£400 million ($668 million) will be spend on installing and monitoring CCTV cameras in the homes of private citizens. Why? To make sure the kids are doing their homework, going to bed early and eating their vegetables. The scheme has, astonishingly, already been running in 2,000 family homes.
via Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.
Regular readers know I’m a bit of a contrarian on privacy issues. At first, I had a similar reaction as Sorrel to hear that England was giving all these families the Big Brother treatment. But then I reconsidered. What if cameras really turn sh%**y parents into good parents?
The Daily Mail says that the program is reserved for England’s “worst families.” The hope is to get kids from families plagued by domestic violence, drug use, and alcohol abuse on the right track:
Under the so-called Family Intervention Projects, they will be given intensive 24-hour supervision to make sure children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.
Parents are also given help to stop them leading dysfunctional lives and to combat drug or alcohol addiction…
Mr Balls said: ‘This is pretty tough and non-negotiable support for families to get to the root of the problem.’
via Thousands of England’s worst families to be placed in ’sin bins’ to improve behaviour | Mail Online.
It’s certainly draconian. But what if it works?
I’d love to hear more about the results for the 2,000 families already undergoing this massive invasion of privacy. Many of those who oppose privacy — most famously esteemed federal judge Richard Posner — feel that people without privacy are well-behaved people:
Posner writes on his blog that privacy allows us to do bad things:
My own view is that we tend to place somewhat too much weight on privacy. The word “privacy” has strongly positive connotations (like “freedom”), which obscures analysis…. [P]eople want to control what is known about them by other people. They want to conceal facts about themselves that are embarrassing or discreditable.
Maybe this extreme monitoring program will improve the home lives of thousands of British families. Knowing that you’re being watched might make you send a child to his or her room instead of cursing at them or abusing them.
That said, I certainly don’t want a camera installed in my living room.
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As Plato explains in the Republic (using the story of the ring of Gyges) the goal of society should be to get people to behave when they are not being watched. It seems like good parenting would include the same goal.
I guess I don’t really see how constant surveillance teaches kids anything more than figuring out how to avoid surveillance.
Then again, I don’t have kids and if I did they will ill trained and worse behaved. I’m not having children until the nanny-bot comes off the line.
This seems kind of off topic, but the ring of Gyges story isn’t meant to show that the goal of society is to get people to behave without being watched. The RoF story is Glaucon’s immoralist challenge to Plato’s belief that people have most reason to be just, rather than greedy etc. Glaucon believes that if we had the RoG there would be no reason to be just, since we could never get caught. Socrates says otherwise, hoping to show that justice is a virtue regardless of the existence of the state.