Author Archives: Christopher Bates

Christopher J. Bates is a fourth-year student in Criminology, Law and Society Department at UC Irvine. Chris’ employs novel spatial datasets, such as Google Street View, Twitter, and Socrata, and interdisciplinary methodology, from economics, criminology, & geography, to research the community context of crime. In addition to his research interests, Chris has a passion for using technology to publicly communicate research findings through websites, videos, and interactive applications.
Image of an off-white bullet shaped device.

Regulating Physical Places with Digital Code

Editor’s Note: This is the seventh and final post in our Law in Computation series. At first, I was perplexed by the K5 by Knightscope, a “fully autonomous security data machine,” rolling through the Irvine Spectrum Shopping Center last summer. Now, I am not cavalier, nor naive, about my rights to privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity, but I fully accept that I will be captured by surveillance cameras from my arrival to departure in many private places. After all, there is a strong market demand for surveillance technologies, and the market has long existed with little regulations from statutory or case law; their use continues to expand as the cost of sensors and data processing decreases. (read more...)