Over the weekend, thousands poured out into the streets to celebrate this year’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras – the city’s first since the pandemic. With Sydney also hosting WorldPride this week, Aussies were joined by flocks of tourists who’ve travelled here to celebrate queer history and experience.
But some say the parade also hosted a few uninvited guests, with extra surveillance technology installed in the city centre to track crowd density and monitor attendees’ moods.
Several extra CCTV cameras were installed temporarily along Oxford Street ahead of Saturday’s parade. The cameras were equipped with high-tech data analytics software, able to measure crowd mood and density.
The technology is developed by Dynamic Crowd Measurement, and analyses the average mood of a crowd by ranking individuals as happy, neutral, sad, or angry. It also measures the walking speed of the crowd and tracks its density.
This surveillance technology was introduced by the management of Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, who say the decision was made to safeguard against dangerous bottlenecks and crowd crushes.
“The technology helps with managing the safety of the crowd by measuring capacities, allowing operations to zone in on an area that needs immediate response or to plan ahead for where there are areas of growing crowds,” said a Mardi Gras spokesperson, speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald. The spokesperson maintained the software did not use ‘facial recognition tracking’.
It’s true that awareness of potentially-fatal crowd surges has been growing recently, with tragedies like the Seoul Halloween crowd crush and Astroworld highlighting the importance of crowd control at major events.
But not everyone is happy with this level of surveillance in the name of safety, and a number of people have been voicing their discontent on Twitter.
WorldPride has also jumped on the surveillance bandwagon, with at least two devices to measure ‘radio frequency density’ installed in festival hotspots. These boxes measure radio frequencies to count the number of mobile phones in a given area. Again, a spokesperson assured the SMH that the data collected was “not personally identifiable”.
It’s become a pattern in many countries to use ‘public safety’ as a veil for passing intrusive surveillance measures – COVID and terror threats have been the favourite cover stories in recent years.
Australia is no different: a few years ago, the Morrison administration passed a bill that expanded already-invasive online surveillance in the name of ‘terrorism’ and ‘child abuse’ threats.
Facial recognition software scandals have cropped up in several major Aussie corporations, including Kmart and Bunnings. And during the height of the pandemic, several state governments trialled COVID quarantine ‘check-in’ apps that relied on facial recognition combined with GPS data to monitor people’s compliance with isolation rules.
This isn’t to say that a few extra cameras and monitoring of crowd numbers should be seen as an extreme and invasive step to take. But it does fall into a concerning pattern of continuing to push the envelope on ‘acceptable’ surveillance measures. What exactly Australians should be comfortable with giving up in the name of public safety is a discussion that merits more careful deliberation.
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