The increasing use of body cameras to record police encounters has raised new questions about how to store all that video, as well as the price Americans will pay for privacy, reports Bloomberg Business. A $2.7 million contract between Taser International and the Fort Worth, Tx., police department shows that keeping an archive of digital police videos doesn’t come cheap. Under the five-year contract, the police department is paying Taser nearly 23 times as much to license the company’s Evidence.com app and cover video-storage fees as Amazon Web Services charges for storage alone.
Taser itself uses Amazon to host files for Evidence.com. Police get a lot those additional services, says Taser spokesman Steve Tuttle. Evidence.com is not only a storage system, he says, but an “ecosystem” that “securely manages, shares, and provides tools and mobile applications well beyond just storage, including audit trails, redaction capabilities, and chain of custody.” He says Amazon’s platform doesn’t provide all those options, so a direct comparison is inaccurate.