Big Brother is watching: Chinese city with 2.6m cameras is world’s most heavily surveilled | Cities | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/02/big-brother-is-watching-chinese-city-with-26m-cameras-is-worlds-most-he
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Eight of the 10 most surveilled cities in the analysis are in China. London ranked sixth with 627,707 cameras covering 9 million residents and Atlanta, Georgia, came 10th with 7,800 cameras for 501,178 people.
Omanovic argues that live facial recognition fundamentally threatens free societies. “It might start with the monitoring of just a few thousand people but it definitely won’t end there,” says Omanovic. “Authorities need to permanently ban its roll out now before it’s too late.” There seems to be little sign, though, of cities scaling back surveillance in the near future. “Of all the cities we looked at, the vast majority were increasing their CCTV use or had plans in place to up their surveillance,” says Paul Bischoff, editor of Comparitech. “Singapore has plans to install 100,000 facial-recognition cameras on lampposts, Chicago police have asked for 30,000 more, and Moscow intends to have 174,000 by the end of this year.”