A coordinated sea-watch across the Philippines set a global record on Saturday, when 8,412 camera glasses captured simultaneous 90-second panoramas from 52 coastal sites. Hours later, the country’s maritime coordination office urged organisers to pause uploads, warning that footage intended to document the sea could also expose vessel movements and people’s faces.
The count was certified at 07:12 by the Pacific Record Ledger, which said its observers checked timestamped footage from sites in Palawan, Zambales and Bataan. Organisers said participants stayed on shore or in port; no one was sent into contested waters. The previous record, set by a coastal mapping project in another region, was 2,060 devices.
A record with a security cost
The campaign, organised by the volunteer group Bantay Bay Network, used glasses supplied by IslaTurn Optics, a Manila-based camera maker. The company and local donors spent ₱6.8 million (about €108,000) on equipment and transport, organisers said. Participants made recordings offline; organisers planned to upload them later to a public map of visible shipping activity.
Privacy lawyer Matúš Kopecký said the plan had no clear rule for removing faces, boat names or incidental footage of homes along the shore. “A public sea map should not quietly become a public archive of everyone who happened to be looking out to sea,” he said. Organisers say recordings will be held for 30 days, but have not published a deletion protocol.
We have put the horizon on the public record, but we will not pretend every image is harmless.
Lisandro Pires, Bantay Bay Network organiser
China’s embassy in Manila called the campaign “provocative surveillance” in a message to reporters, arguing that civilian recordings of maritime traffic could heighten regional mistrust. Embassy spokesman Valeriu G. Teodorescu said the Philippines should prevent private groups from “turning ordinary coastlines into monitoring stations”. Organisers replied that the footage showed only what visitors and residents could already see.
Manila weighs a temporary halt
Radio D. Negri, deputy director of the Philippine maritime coordination office, said officials had asked the network to stop uploading footage for 72 hours while they reviewed its collection and storage rules. “We are not ordering people to stop looking at the sea,” he said. “We need to know where the recordings go, who can search them and how quickly they disappear.”
The government has not said whether it will seek a permanent restriction. Kacung Siregar, IslaTurn’s chief executive, said the glasses store footage locally until users upload it and that the company would disable the network’s shared map if officials requested it. He said the firm had not received any request for individual recordings.
Pires said the group would comply with the pause but would not abandon the watch. Its volunteers planned to publish a revised consent form and blur faces before restarting uploads, he said. At the Puerto Princesa waterfront, some participants packed away their glasses; others argued that a record-setting view of the sea should not disappear before the public can see it.
