Ride the Lightning

Is That a Camera in the Airplane Seat in Front of You?

February 21, 2019

CNET recently carried a mind-boggling post about a Singapore Airlines passenger who discovered a camera aimed at him from the back of the seat in front of him. Vitaly Kamluk caused quite a dust-up with that discovery. He shared via Twitter a photo of what looked like a camera installed directly beneath the inflight entertainment screen on the aircraft.

Singapore Airlines replied that it was indeed a camera, embedded into the seat back by the original equipment manufacturers of the plane, but said the cameras had been disabled on its aircraft and "there are no plans to develop any features" using them.

I loved the dripping irony of this sentence from the post: "And I think we can all agree, if a camera is built into a device, it will always remain unused, always remain secure, and will never be used to capture footage."

The author is quite right that cameras have a way of getting turned on.

Why would the "original equipment manufacturers" install cameras?  Because we are an audience to be marketed to, data to be mined and a captive set of eyeballs to be coerced. Will the cabin crew be taking notes about whether seat 64B is watching the safety demonstration? Will the cameras track our gaze to see if we're watching in-flight commercials? Will all the footage be retained somewhere?

To quote from the post: "Cameras are in our advertising billboards, in our smart home devices and on every second street corner, tracking our movements and slowly building up a picture of our lives in minute-by-minute real time. Add airplanes to the mix and you have a terrifying new way to calculate your social credit score. What happens on the way to Vegas doesn't stay in the air."

And we've all heard the stories of what happens in the air . . .

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