A perspective on surveillance from a guy with fifteen cameras

- Thing 1: you have to monitor them. And sure, I can pull up a display with every single one of them. And I can fast-forward and I can motion-sense and I can time-lapse but fundamentally, "hey one of our dental assistant's cars got broken into" is two hours for me to grab the footage from the cameras I can see her car on.

- Thing 2: having the footage doesn't make it useful. I've got a few of these smoke detector-lookin' critters because they give me lots of wide-area surveillance for not a lot of money. But they're on the ceiling and you can't see faces. Something that covers a wide area gives you shitty close-ups.

- Thing 3. Having useful footage doesn't make it legally useful. Got a lease? Your landlord can't break it without paying the penalties in the lease. He says "but you smoked pot which is against my rules" and you say "prove it" and he says "look I have this awesome footage in your living room of you sparking up" and you say "what the what" and call the police and he goes to jail. Even in Canada.

Note that I am not a fan of surveillance. I do not think it should be everywhere. I have it at my house to keep the neighbor kid from breaking in, and I have it at my workplace because it's useful to know what's going on there without bugging my wife for updates (and because the landlord had a shitty system that has been replaced with a less-shitty one). Even so, the surveillance that everyone freaks out about is reasonably, understandably the government overreaching because they can. Private citizens surveilling other private citizens is held very dimly by the courts.

Maybe your landlord is a perv. There was a movie 'bout that. Had a great soundtrack a Baldwin and Sharon Stone masturbating. If your landlord is a businessman, then cameras in apartments is a bad investment. It comes with a lot of legal hazard and requires a lot of effort to collect evidence of misbehavior that he can't use.