What It Means for Stakeholders

For residents

Children can play outside on their own, safely. Less worry about the way to and from school.
Missing children and older people are found sooner.
Walking at night and everyday outings feel safer.
And every time your images are viewed — by whom, and for what — it is recorded and audited.

For municipalities

New public-safety infrastructure can be built on existing streetlights and their regular renewal cycles.
VRAIO allows concerns about privacy to be answered with a concrete mechanism.
It can be introduced step by step, starting with limited pilots.

For the police

Routes in public space do not break off. Tracking a suspect always connects up to "entered some private property".
Today's relay investigations (collecting footage from nearby cameras one by one) become systematic and fast.
Because every retrieval is recorded under proper procedure, it is easier to show the authenticity of evidence and the lawfulness of its collection. This also protects the police from accusations of abuse.

VRAIO does not tie the hands of the police; it gives legitimacy to police capabilities.

For companies

FMPS is not about adding one more camera product. It is a proposal for a new public-infrastructure industry, spanning many fields:

streetlights and lighting
cameras and sensors
telecommunications
AI and video analytics
cybersecurity and cryptography
installation, maintenance and operation
independent recording and auditing

Companies that join early can go beyond selling equipment: identifying technical and institutional challenges not yet recognised, creating intellectual property, establishing operating models, and helping shape interoperability standards. We are looking for pioneering industrial partners to work on prototype development and pilot demonstrations. (Contact)

Legal basis

For full-scale introduction of FMPS + VRAIO, we believe national legislation is needed, setting out who may retrieve which information under which conditions, how recording and audits are carried out, and what sanctions apply to misconduct.

Limited pilots, however, can be carried out without waiting for new legislation, within existing data-protection law (in Japan, the Act on the Protection of Personal Information) and municipal ordinances and guidelines on security cameras.

Who pays?

How costs are shared is also for society to decide. Possible options include:

municipalities including it in streetlight-renewal budgets
national subsidies
joint funding by public-safety authorities and municipalities
a combination of these

Cost estimates are given in Chapter 5 as a basis for decisions.

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FMPS + VRAIO: Public-safety infrastructure built on streetlights, and the governance of AI outputs | Yusaku Fujii (Gunma University) and NPO e-JIKEI Network Promotion Institute
This site presents a research-stage concept; all figures are estimates.