Mass surveillance to ensure residents are complying.
The latest move by Oxfordshire County Council is to install dozens of 'smart' cameras that track everyone's movement around the city. It doesn't matter your mode of transport either, you're still tracked even on foot, because it's not about traffic jams, and never was, it's about freedom of movement.
The Cameras, that have appeared on poles and lampposts all over the city, track everyone regardless of how they're travelling. Even those on foot are tracked. Walkers, Cyclists, Joggers as well as motorists are all captured, tracked, and logged using Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.
The cameras have been installed specifically to monitor residents movements. ALL RESIDENTS, ALL OF THE TIME. The entire project is only to ensure residents are complying with the council's 15 minute city plan and staying in their allotted zones like good little citizens.
Oxfordshire County Council have installed a network of these AI cameras, called Vivacity Sensors, stating on their website:
"There has been a growing network of VivaCity object identification sensors in and around Oxford for several years. The sensors are positioned on LTN boundary roads (roads immediately surrounding an LTN area – see our East Oxford LTN plans page and some of the roads inside the LTN area. They count and classify road users including cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, using machine vision. No personal data is collected, and the raw images from the camera are not used."
The system uses Artificial Intelligence enabling the council to track everyone simultaneously. This also allows them to claim that 'personal data' is not seen by any humans, merely by an autonomous all-seeing machine that they have control of.
VivaCity Labs, who appear to have cornered the market on dystopian tech, claim that their system is "Powered by advanced AI computer vision, VivaCity sensors provide highly accurate multimodal transport data. Outperforming traditional monitoring technology, data is easy to access, secure and comprehensive, offering insights into movements, speeds, turning behaviours, near miss incidents, traffic flow and more.
The sensors (cameras) are located on the boundaries of the 15 minute neighbourhoods recording who goes in, who goes out, where they go, how they get there, and how long they were out of their allotted zone. And don't think you can beat the system either, they're on every boundary road and log every movement. Total surveillance, and a world away from the claim that they're "just traffic filters."