Police in Surrey have the largest drone squadron in the UK after being given 250,000 pound to buy new drones.↗ The police force has already trained 38 of its members of staff how to fly drones and will be expanding its fleet from one to five. Surveillance drone policing becomes real.

There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being Blind. - Paul Virilio

Among the various forms of surveillance, the severity of camera surveillance was already foreseen by British author George Orwell in 1949. In his novel 1984, all citizens live under constant government surveillance, primarily through telescreens. The phrase "Big Brother is watching you." serves as both a slogan of social control and a warning for citizens to obey without question. After encountering the novel and film 1984, I became deeply interested in how camera surveillance operates in modern society.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.↗
- George Orwell

Superflux's "Drone Aviary" project explores the potential future of surveillance drone policing. This monitoring system will play a role in watching the public more discreetly and indiscriminately. Nightwatchman is a highly mobile data acquisition drone that can be utilized by various organizations, from local councils to law enforcement agencies. It is securely connected to a centralized database, allowing it to collect and analyze vast amounts of location-based and subject-specific data. This enables it to perform a wide range of surveillance tasks, from documenting civil offenses to detecting potential terrorist threats.

What if a surveillance drone system adopted a method of blurring faces to protect people's visual anonymity? Such an approach could serve as an alternative to indiscriminate camera surveillance and potentially become a point of compromise to ease the tension between privacy and surveillance. Could this be a viable solution for shifting from an irrational surveillance system to a more rational drone monitoring system for citizens?

In the field of design, various attempts have been made to evade camera surveillance by concealing faces. One of the most notable projects is ‘CV Dazzle’, a facial protection technology designed to camouflage faces and resist surveillance. This project represents ‘A Form of Resistance’. The designer realized that to evade CCTV surveillance, it is necessary to disrupt facial recognition systems by altering facial features. In fact, since facial recognition systems operate based on the fundamental structure of a face, methods that distort this structure can be highly effective.

Essentially what is being looked at is a landscape of the face. … Facial recognition software takes various measurements of each face and turns these into a string of numbers. Then it’s just a matter of comparing one string of numbers with another. The higher the similarity score, the more likely it is that you’re looking at the same person.↗

Facial recognition operates based on the algorithm above. In other words, by using methods such as camouflage, faces captured and stored by camera surveillance cannot be recognized or identified. This is a crucial factor in protecting personal identity in an environment of widespread camera surveillance.

If you want to be invisible from the system, you should hide your face.

Unlike CV Dazzle, which takes the form of resistance, a notable example of a compromise approach is YouTube and Google. They introduced a face-blurring feature to protect visual anonymity. In 2012, YouTube published a post titled "Face Blurring: When Footage Requires Anonymity," explaining the key purpose of this feature.

Whether you want to share sensitive protest footage without exposing the faces of the activists involved, or share the winning point in your 8-year-old’s basketball game without broadcasting the children’s faces to the world, our face blurring technology is a first step towards providing visual anonymity for video on YouTube.↗

Visual anonymity in video allows people to share personal footage more widely and to speak out when they otherwise may not.↗

Because human rights footage, in particular, opens up new risks to the people posting videos and to those filmed, it’s important to keep in mind other ways to protect yourself and the people in your videos.↗

Such systems highlight the importance of privacy protection and personal identity while serving as a potential compromise in a surveillance-driven society.

This project proposes a rational system design for surveillance drone policing. This project explores the possibility of camera monitoring systems 'protecting' the public while highlighting the tensions between privacy and surveillance. On October 12, 2016, at the Nursery Gallery, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, selected images were exhibited from the Postgraduate Show 2016, featuring visitors whose faces were protected as part of the project. This project explores a compromise between surveillance and privacy protection, applying real-time face-blurring technology to ensure visual anonymity.