Good evening, fellow night crawlers. Gerald here, reporting live from the ceiling corner of a guardhouse somewhere in the Klang Valley, where the only surveillance technology currently operational is my own two eyeballs and a mosquito coil that gave up around 11pm.
I need to talk about something that’s been bothering me. DBKL has quietly installed 10,000 facial recognition cameras across Kuala Lumpur since 2020, at a price tag of roughly RM500 million. Ten thousand. That’s enough cameras to give every lamppost in the city its own personality. Meanwhile, the guardhouse I’m currently perched in has one working light bulb and a plastic chair with a leg missing.
I’m not against technology. I’m a gecko who lives near a router, I have opinions about bandwidth. But somebody, somewhere, needs to explain the budgeting logic here.
The City Can Recognise Your Face. It Still Can’t Recognise Guards Need Aircon.
Here’s the part that really gets my tail twitching. While City Hall is out here deploying facial recognition at a scale that would make a Bond villain blush, actual human beings — actual PKs, doing actual 12-hour shifts — are still sweating it out in guardhouses with zero ventilation. We wrote about this before: aircon in guardhouses isn’t a luxury, it’s a safety issue. Heat exhaustion doesn’t care how advanced your CCTV network is.
So somewhere in KL there’s a facial recognition camera powerful enough to identify a jaywalker from 40 metres away, quietly filming an empty guardhouse where the guard has stepped out because the heat inside was giving him a headache. Efficient system. Very smart city. Very hot guard.
Meanwhile, Everyone’s Data Is Going on a Little Road Trip
It’s not just the cameras. Under new rules that kicked in on 1 June 2026, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube now have to verify users are 16 or older. Sounds sensible on paper. Except it means sensitive identity data now travels from you, to the platform, to third-party verification vendors, to government systems — a whole chain of hands, each one a potential weak link. Analysts have already asked, quite reasonably, whether Malaysia is building surveillance infrastructure faster than it’s building the rules to govern it.
I’m just a gecko, but even I know: the longer the chain, the more places something can go wrong. And nobody’s asked me, a resident of several guardhouses across the Klang Valley, for my consent on any of this. Rude, honestly.
Gerald’s Modest Proposal
Here’s my pitch to whoever’s holding the budget pen: for every 1,000 facial recognition cameras installed, allocate funds for one (1) working fan in a guardhouse. At this rate, we’d have covered every guardhouse in the Klang Valley twice over already.
Until then, I’ll keep doing what I do best — sitting very still, watching everything, and asking for absolutely nothing in return. Unlike some multi-million-ringgit camera networks I could mention.
Stay cool out there, PKs. Literally, if you can manage it.
— Gerald
References:
Stratsea Publication. (2026). Is Malaysia Building Surveillance Faster Than It Can Govern? Stratsea. Reporting on DBKL’s 10,000-camera facial recognition network in Kuala Lumpur and the data chain created by new online age-verification rules. https://stratsea.com/2026/07/17/is-malaysia-building-surveillance-faster-than-it-can-govern/
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