Page 31 - GCN, August/September 2018

Statuscheck IOT
Connecting surveillance
cameras to smartphones
New technology allows public surveillance cameras to send personalized messages to people’s phones
BY PATRICK MARSHALL
ou’re preparing to cross a
downtown street and your
smartphone beeps to tell you that a text message has arrived. You con- tinue walking as you pull out your phone to check the message, and the phone receives an alert from your local police department: You’re about to step into the
path of a rapidly approaching SUV!
device, but PHADE uses a unique meth- od of matching messages to recipients. A video stream tracks the movements of people within range, then analyzes and encodes those movements as an “ad- dress.” Meanwhile, an application on a subject’s smartphone is doing the same analysis using the phone’s sensors.
When PHADE broadcasts a message, it
ernments improve public safety. “For ex- ample, the government can deploy cam- eras in high-crime or high-accident areas and warn specific users about potential threats, such as suspicious followers,” she added.
The technology could also be used to provide tailored information to visitors at museums or historical sites.
Still, there’s something unsettling about a communications system that watches our movements and sends mes- sages based on what we are doing. It might save us from being run over by an approaching car, but it might also be used to pester us with advertisements as we walk through a store.
The prospects become even more un- settling if entities — whether govern- ment agencies or companies — combine PHADE with other technologies, such as face-recognition programs and ar- tificial intelligence that can identify a subject’s sexual orientation. (Yes, such software exists, according to a recent ar- ticle by Yilun Wang and Michal Kosinski in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.)
Although PHADE does not violate the
privacy of smartphone owners, as Wang said, it does offer a unique opportunity for governments or companies that li- cense the technology to intrude on that privacy.
“We provide a way to communicate, but how to use it depends on the entities who apply our work,” Wang said.•
“The government can deploy cameras in high-crime or high-accident areas and warn specific users about potential threats, such as suspicious followers.”
Such a scenario could become possible with a technology called PHADE that al- lows public surveillance cameras to send personalized messages to people without knowing their phones’ addresses.
Developed by researchers at Purdue University, PHADE digitally associates people in the camera’s view with their smartphones by using the subjects’ be- havioral address — or the identifiers extracted from their movements in the surveillance video.
Traditional communications require an IP address or a media access control address to deliver messages to the right
— Siyuan Cao, Purdue University
will be received only by the smartphone that has a matching “address.” Even bet- ter, the system does not violate individu- als’ privacy, said He Wang, an assistant professor of computer science at Purdue University who developed the technol- ogy with Ph.D. student Siyuan Cao.
After encoding a user’s movements to create an address, PHADE “blurs” the data to prevent it from being used to identify the person. In addition, it allows the personal sensing data to remain on subjects’ phones instead of uploading the data to a server.
Cao said the technology can help gov-
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