The Sinister Smiles of CCTV Signs

Most of the criticism I post here is about news outlets, primarily because these are the sources which most explicitly change our perception of the world. But in a way, these things are pretty harmless if you're a little bit aware of the hazards involved in consuming them. Sort of. I didn't just call the Daily Mail harmless. But what I'm getting at is that there are more subtle ways people, and particularly organizations, affect our outlook on certain issues:

I don't know about anybody else, but this sign makes me a million times more nervous and scared than I can ever imagine feeling on seeing a sign that said You are being filmed and recorded for the purposes of security and safety. I don't find the smiley face funny; I find it terrifying as hell. I don't find the laid-back and presumably hilarious tone of the text cute; I find it actually pretty sinister.

There are certain things that don't need joking about. If the point of CCTV is to make the world safer, surely trivialising its use to the extent that you're making faintly Orwellian wisecracks at the expense of actual information is a poor communication decision at best. But maybe it's not. No, maybe it's deliberate. Maybe the companies and organizations that use uncomfortably nonchalant signage like this are just paving the way for a tipping point where people stop noticing that they're on camera. Maybe they know that.

Make no mistake: they do. It's a process of desensitisation, of making people unconsciously numb to a blasé and relaxed approach to the idea of a stranger taking thousands of pictures of them every minute. If this sounds like a conspiracy theory, I'm not saying CCTV is Satan incarnate. I'm saying that there are debated to be had about its impact on freedom and privacy, and that signs like that piece of shit up there^ do no justice to the seriousness that even MAKING a sign so apologetically awkward implies. If you accept people need to be made to feel less uptight about CCTV cameras, the best way to do it is not to make light of their fear in the first place.

It terrifies me that someone somewhere, by way of either stupidity or treachery, thought this a good idea.