Here’s a new and controversial money making idea: getting paid to spot crimes on CCTV.
That’s just what new website “Internet Eyes” is offering to do when it launches next month, offering you the chance of earning up to £1,000 per month for spotting shoplifting, burglary, vandalism or anti-social behaviour.
Internet Eyes is a worldwide online instant event notification system utilising video feed to notify the owner of the feed (customer) that an event is occurring.
Translated, that means you’ll have to sit through hours of CCTV footage (from some unidentified location) in the hope that you spot something interesting and vaguely criminal going on. If you do spot something, you’ll be rewarded, not only in monetary terms, but you’ll also be awarded points and the chance to rise up the league table of super-snoopers. Kudos indeed.
If that’s not enough, Internet Eyes offers you the chance to “potentially become a hero and save lives”, all from the comfort of your living room. As you remain anonymous, the video feeds random and locations undisclosed, you’ll probably only be a hero to yourself though.
Before they launch, there’s still a few issues Internet Eyes needs to iron out before launch, not least the fact that watching CCTV feeds online breaches the UK Data Protection laws, although they counter this by saying that feeds and reporters are anonymous. It’s obviously an interesting business model, and actually quite a clever way of harnessing a mass audience to do something that could take a lot of man-power to do, but it could easily fall down on the serious privacy issues, amongst other issues, so we don’t know whether it will turn out to be a viable business, or indeed source of income
If it does succeed in getting round these problems, you know how you’re going to fill your time once Big Brother finally disappears from our TV screens.
Via TechRadar.
photo credit: D.C.Atty
this service is stupid for people who view. Why would i waste my time looking at cctv when someone else who reported 1 more crime than me gets money and I don’t. People should be paid full stop to watch, whether they do 1 hr or 20 hrs! this is really stupid!