Our own Kris Kotarski in The Calgary Herald:
Earlier this fall, British company Internet Eyes figured out a way to cash in on CCTV. It bills itself as “an online instant event notification system” that will allow “viewers” to “anonymously monitor random video feeds streamed from privately owned establishments.”
“Viewers” in this case are people. “Events” are crimes, imagined or real. And the “instant event notification system” must be the object of desire for every generalissimo in the world, aspiring or real.
Internet Eyes bills its service as a game, where people “report crime as it happens,” scoring “points” for “neutral” alerts when the “viewer” acts in good faith but does not report an actual crime, or “positive” alerts when a crime was actually committed. The first results in one point; the second in three. A “negative” alert brings zero points, which does not help when one aspires to win the £1,000 monthly prize, to be awarded to “the highest crime scoring member every month.”
“This is about crime prevention,” founder James Woodward told the BBC, as his company prepares to charge “viewers” £1 per alert and CCTV camera owners £20 each month to add their footage to the central database. “What we're doing is we're putting more eyes onto those cameras so that they are monitored.”
More here.