No way, no way.”Īsked about that speculation, Vumacam says it doesn’t use facial recognition and will not consider using it until the technology is adequately regulated. “This is definitely facial recognition,” he speculates, meaning that the camera could record video at high enough resolution for such technology to work. “That is the first time-that big, big, big thing-that is the first time I’ve seen it,” he sputters with growing animation. Next to a mall, Nkosi, now on foot, stops and gapes at the latest fixture: a camera quadruple the size of all the others. As cramped streets give way to highway and highway to affluent areas, these installations come into view: steely gray poles with thick fat discs in the middle where clusters of CCTV cameras hang like bats, their gaze trained on the roads.īy the time we reach Rosebank, an upscale suburb of Johannesburg, the poles spring from concrete faster than we can count. Vumacam originally placed them where it could find paying customers. Thus far Soweto has been spared the cameras, precisely because it is poor.

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