‘Stasi-style citizen spy game’ website attacked

CAMPAIGNERS yesterday criticised a new website that allows anyone in Europe to monitor commercial CCTV footage live online as a “Stasi-style citizen spy game” that should be banned.

Internet Eyes will pay up to £1,000 (€1,160) to subscribers who regularly report suspicious activity such as shoplifting.

But civil rights campaigners said the website, which launched yesterday, “marks another dubious chapter in Britain’s surveillance society”.

The website, which evoked images of Stasi-style surveillance seen in the 2006 film The Lives of Others, was designed to tackle shoplifting by enabling vigilante viewers to spot the crimes and then click an alert button to notify the business owner within moments.

An Internet Eyes spokesman said it was “a tool to allow citizens to assist trained personnel in the fight against crime”.

“All too often criminals get away with crime because, although their activity is monitored by CCTV, it is not observed at the time of the offence but only later on reviewing the footage when it is too late to stop commission of the crime,” he said.

Every viewer is allowed five alerts each month to prevent abuse of the system.

But campaign groups No CCTV and Privacy International objected to the website enabling the public to snoop on others from their own home and urged anyone affected “to contact us with a view to legal action”.

Charles Farrier, of No CCTV, said: “The information commissioner has put private profit above personal privacy in allowing a private company to launch its Stasi-style citizen spy game rather than defending the rights of British citizens.

“This is the privatisation of the surveillance society – a private company asking private individuals to spy on each other using private cameras connected to the internet. Internet Eyes must be challenged.”

A spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said: “Our CCTV code of practice makes it clear that CCTV operators should use appropriately trained staff to monitor images.

“We have provided advice to Internet Eyes on its own data protection compliance. We will be checking to ensure it has followed this and investigate any complaints we receive.”