Researchers are devising ways to automatically analyze CCTV and other security footage. The hope is that such technology will help police and other security officials to catch bad guys more quickly and more often, while minimizing the invasion of privacy of law-abiding citizens.

A group from Kingston University's Digital Imaging Research Center (DIRC) is working on the tech. James Orwell, head of the DIRC's Surveillance Research Group, told The Engineer, "We plan to develop components to automatically analyse multi-camera networks and footage before and after a trigger incident, such as a riot or fight, to produce a set of video segments relevant to a potential police investigation." Using visual analysis (the DIRC offers scant details on the exact mechanism), the software can scan all the relevant footage and essentially automate a process that police might spend countless hours doing by hand.

For example, explains Orwell, say a man in a hooded sweatshirt suddenly smashes a window. That's an event worth noting. The cops are going to want to scan all the footage from CCTV or surveillance cameras not just outside the store, but in the whole town center where the event took place. Maybe the bad guy thought he was out of range when he walked a few blocks away, and pulled down his hood, but little did he know that a camera outside a bank caught his face. If the cops can retrace the suspect's path, they can potentially crack the case. The DIRC system proposes to do all this automatically. "A simple intruder-detection system could trigger the identification of all video data containing other observations of the intruder," said Orwell.

Not only does this make cops' jobs easier, it also helps assuage some of the concerns of privacy advocates, who are increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of video footage of our behavior that winds up in archives. If a computer could automatically detect and preserve footage "of interest," the rest can be safely deleted, minimizing the invasion to our privacy.

The research is reminiscent of similar technology that was tested in June 2011 in a Manchester Airport. The surveillance system, called "Tag and Track", developed by security company Ipsotek (tagline: "Recognise. Analyse. Realise"), allows security officials to tag suspicious individuals and then have the system track them across multiple cameras. Again, this is something security personnel already do, only in a more analog capacity. This can work in retrospect, for a forensic analysis after an event or crime, or it can work in real time. Sometimes a security worker, for all his efforts and training, might simply lose a suspect, one that has suddenly grabbed a piece of suspicious luggage from a baggage scanner, in a crowd when scanning a series of screens in a control room—and that's the last thing you want to happen. Ipsotek's system can serve as crucial backup in such a case, potentially averting an attack and saving lives.

What of the eternal give-and-take between security and privacy? What's intriguing about the new system in particular is that, though it crunches more data and has an omnivorous appetite for CCTV footage, by reducing the rate of false positives, you're less likely to be searched or detained unnecessarily. The dreaded pat-down, enemy of the privacy advocate, would hopefully become a thing of the past. Paradoxically, by increasing surveillance—and using new techniques to parse that data effectively—invasions of privacy, while all the more ubiquitous, could become less noticeable and disruptive. Though perhaps that's what many privacy advocates fear most.

At the end of the film The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg approaches the ex-girlfriend whom, earlier in the film, he had dragged through the mud online. He wasn't getting her back, of course. As she put it: "The Internet isn't written in pencil, Mark. It's written in ink."

But what if that could change?

A growing group of privacy advocates in the U.S. and abroad want the Internet to be written in pencil. In particular, they'd like it to be easier for their children to take down posts or other information that they once put online and now wish they hadn't.

The movement is particularly strong in Europe. The European Union, which proposed legislation on the subject last year, calls it the "Right to Be Forgotten." The 20-page document proposing the legislation advocated sweeping changes to privacy online, according to the U.K.'s Telegraph. Individuals could sue websites and delete just about any information about themselves online. Internet users would have to opt in before companies could track their data in the first place. "The protection of personal data is a fundamental right," explained Viviane Reding, the EU commissioner for justice in charge of the proposed rules.

On Wednesday, news emerged from Spain that the "Right to Be Forgotten" was being taken very seriously there indeed. The Associated Press reported that Spain's Data Protection Agency ordered Google to remove links to material related to about 90 people. These include plastic surgeon Hugo Guidotti, a high-ranked Google hit for whom is a 1991 newspaper story about a $7.2 million lawsuit on a breast job that allegedly went bad (Guidotti eventually won the suit). Hardly good for business.

"This is just the beginning, this right to be forgotten, but it's going to be much more important in the future," said Artemi Rallo, the Spanish Data Protection Agency's director, according to the AP.

It's likely to become more important in the U.S. as well, if American activists have their way. Last December, an online-safety organization called Common Sense Media argued that "Web companies should develop tools that make it easier for young people—or their parents—to completely opt out and delete this information." They wanted, they said, an "Internet Erase Button."

Arguably, though, an "Internet Erase Button" or a "Right to Be Forgotten" might do as much harm as good. Forbes's Adam Thierer rightly points out that press freedom and the freedom of speech are widely under threat. Sometimes the right to information ought to outweigh the right to privacy. What incentive will there ever be for a journalist to rake muck if the information can simply be taken down upon request? "Every blogger could conceivably be asked at any time to delete any comment on any post ever written," Thierer notes. "Who makes these calls?"

Still, in two kinds of situations—personal information voluntarily submitted to websites, and information posted by or about children—the calls for an erase button seem reasonable. The scenarios posed by some critics of the plans ("Could a public figure claim 'a right to be forgotten' when a journalist pens an article about them beating their wife or committing corporate fraud?" asks Thierer) smack of straw men. Surely a better way can be found to manage the vast and confusing mass of data written by and about us online.

Maybe we don't need to forgo the pen entirely in favor of the pencil—but in some cases, at least, we ought to be able to choose which tool we're writing with.