Under what terms would you support the usage of camera surveillance in public areas by private or public/governmental organizations?
I understand we have been seeing more bills around camera surveillance and am curious as to under what terms you would find them acceptable.
If they had a legitimate and beneficial reason to do so, I guess.
However, since there is no conceivable reason mass surveillance and tracking of a country’s citizens performs any sort of public good, the real answer is that it is just not acceptable.
I was thinking about it recently. The idea is to have public surveillance system where all the records will be encrypted by default and no authority can decrypt it by themselves. But in order to decrypt it, you will need multiple decryption keys owned by different authorities AND people. So if someone wants to see some footage, system will randomly choose some users, which must include e.g. prosecutor, judge, police officers AND random people (similar as a jury). And after they see that request, they choose whether to accept or decline it. And unless e.g. 67% of those accept it, it will not be decrypted 
So anyone of us could get such request sometimes which could make people more aware and it might be a direction to prevent misuse of (public) surveillance systems.
Though I don’t know if it is actually possible to make such system
If government and ‘officials’ said, as it to often does… ‘‘If we can save just one life’’ wouldn’t that fit into today’s “legitimate” and “beneficial” befuddling gobbledygook? We see it everywhere, everyday.
Just my opinions - - -
There are pros and cons to all of it, but I think it boils down to how the government uses the data. Unfortunately, we all know how any government would eventually make use of surveillance ☛ SMRC - (Stalk, Monitor Record and Control).
We are supposed to control our government but we gave them the authority to reverse and abuse that.
The U.S. - well, they already surveil everyone, not as Orwellian as the commander in chief would like, but it’s getting there. The only thing holding it back is that Senators and Congresspersons want to make certain they are not included 
What senator or congressperson wants to be watched?
Most newer vehicles are under surveillance 24/7. Your cell phone is constantly SMRCing you, our laptops, desktops; all digital devices are surveilable and SMRCed.
A interesting website policing-tools search result tells us where it is headed:
Survail is a Law Enforcement investigation tool that analyzes your city’s video surveillance footage to find every license plate possible on every camera in your network (even on cameras that aren’t dedicated to ALPR) and then allows you to map every-where and every-when a particular license plate has been seen. But wait! Allow that, next is the face.
Many schools have cameras in every corridor that has already assimilated our children into accepting Big Bro as ever constant, ever watching - get use to it - it’s for their safety - pick up that gum wrapper!
People jump into their cars, and now their car and phones are being followed - they are use to it. For today’s teenager in 5 years from now … will privacy may be a crime? Cameras in their home would be ‘for their safety and protection’ - of course.
Imagine, no more domestic disputes, break-ins, and it offers safety for seniors needing assistance, and it’s only a step up from the surveillance we already put in our homes that we can check on from the office.
As someone said (it’s never been proven who) ‘Remove one freedom per generation and soon you will have no freedom and no one would have noticed.’
The difference between when this was supposed to be written (200 years ago) and now is that today, we lose freedoms exponentially on a daily basis.
Government has proven time and again that they cannot be trusted - and their pillow-mates - the corporations, even less and even with surveillance being encrypted; it’s not about what information they have, it’s about how they already (ab)use it in order to increase their power over people.
IMO
~o~
It’s no secret that this information will be abused for the benefit of governments and corporations, they seem to grow more powerful every decade and this new technology (modern computers, the internet) will allow them to grow even more.
There are plenty of examples already of shady practices by companies and governments in history, both recent and ancient, so why continue this line of argument? We already know where this leads.
Is it justifiable if it saves at least one life? Recently I read about a woman who was able to detect breast cancer thanks to a thermal camera in a museum. I think this is fantastic, and it was a coincidence, but perhaps we should invest more on medical research than hoping for such incredibly rare moments. Maybe we should invest in education, gun control, rather than security.
I dont think long term camera surveilance is acceptable. There are cases where I want it, like airports and train stations, maybe even some traffic monitoring of the most used highways or city avenues… but there’ll always be another “but what if?” edge case to find an excuse.