[HN Gopher] The Most Surveilled Cities in the World
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The Most Surveilled Cities in the World
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 81 points
Date : 2020-10-26 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.statista.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.statista.com)
| winrid wrote:
| I question the accuracy. When I was in Korla, Xinjiang, there
| were exponentially more cameras than I noticed in the rest of
| China.
|
| Cameras that wouldn't let a gate up unless they got your picture
| going into public places like malls or airports, cameras every
| few miles or so on highways, A few cameras for each road at an
| intersection, to name the interesting ones.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| "Comparitech researchers collated a number of data resources
| and reports, including government reports, police websites, and
| news articles, to get some idea of the number of CCTV cameras
| in use in 150 major cities across the globe. We focused
| primarily on public CCTV--cameras used by government entities
| such as law enforcement."
|
| They seem like VERY vey rough estimates. China probaly has the
| most surveilled city in the world. But effectiveness of
| camera's is a much more important factor. I've heard of many
| places in china where you are forced trough gates with
| photocamera's or active surveillance. China is more than likely
| to have the most fake camera's in the world as well.
|
| https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...
| hellolleh wrote:
| I do not mind being surveilled by public cameras as I do nothing
| illegal.
| keiferski wrote:
| I've been wondering if the combination of remote work and self-
| driving cars will counteract the increasing surveillance of urban
| centers. Does suburbanization/sprawl make surveillance too
| expensive to be practical?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| You'd wish, but I think there will definitely be home office
| surveillance in the employee contract if the economic situation
| of recent years continues.
|
| Suburbanization also makes satellite surveillance easier and
| "acustic" face to face interaction much more difficult.
| BigBubbleButt wrote:
| The self-driving cars can act as super surveillance systems by
| themselves though.
| x87678r wrote:
| I never thought about that. If the police could quickly
| connect to any parked/moving car and see what its cameras saw
| that would be like eyes just about everywhere.
| newbie578 wrote:
| Is anyone truly surprised? The future looks bleak with China set
| to become the global leader (it is just a matter of time at this
| point, especially thanks to COVID).
|
| I only hope for India to also become a major powerhouse to curb
| China, and for Korea and Japan to regain their footing.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Even if the government weren't incentivized to surveil
| everywhere, it's a no brainer for people to install cameras
| around their businesses/homes/cars for liability purposes since
| they are so cheap now.
|
| A couple hundred dollars can reduce a lot of headache, and I
| don't see that incentive going away anytime. I assume every car
| will have a dash cam, a house will have a doorbell cam or
| similar, and every business is monitored everywhere. And
| cities/states will have license plate readers on police
| cars/roads.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Camera's dont 'surveil' anything untill a crime has been
| committed. Only then do people search for active camera's and
| hope it was pointing the right way in daylight or good enough
| infra. China esp will boast camera's everywhere as its a
| dictatorship but with thousands of camera's that may or may not
| work its like finding a needle in a haystack. Every country has a
| different reason for camera's and china especially has a
| different purpose in mind. Its not like their courts or
| policeforces are working on the basis of innocent until proven
| guilty. Being surveilled isn't the goal here, its instilling fear
| of possibly being surveilled (Which is highly likely). Once
| you've fooled the population into thinking everything they do
| will seen by the highest authority, that's when you're closer to
| the holy grail of true power.
| hammock wrote:
| Isn't this argument essentially how the NSA justified mass
| surveillance before Congress, weasel-wording their way around
| the definition of "collection"?
| mpclark wrote:
| They will have missed Monaco, as they only looked at the 150 most
| populated cities. When I was there around the millennium it was
| the clear leader in police officers per head of population, so I
| expect it's also doing well on cameras.
| eunos wrote:
| Maybe that's because Monaco is touristy place.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Which raises the question: should one look at cameras per
| 1000 resident population or cameras per 1000 people present,
| whether resident or tourist?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I guess the point of the post in particular is the London outlier
| but honestly I've always found comparisons of CCTV with
| 'surveillance' in a meaningful sense of the term pretty
| cartoonish. Obviously living in London is not like living in some
| police state.
|
| The same goes for China even. Public camera surveillance I think
| mostly does what it's supposed to do with very little intrusion
| into people's daily lives, in contrast to old school police stops
| and frisks. Travelling I've had more bad run ins with corrupt
| cops in Bulgaria than I had in Beijing.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| This is a critical point, that CCTV and surveillance are two
| different, interrelated things.
|
| Imagine you appear on 50 different CCTV cameras on an average
| day. Now imagine two different scenarios:
|
| Scenario A: Each one of these cameras is operated by a local
| business or property management company. The cameras record
| video that gets overwritten within a few days if there are no
| incidents or requests from law enforcement.
|
| Scenario B: All of these cameras are on a network operated by a
| company with contracts for the city, law enforcement, and
| digital advertising networks. Facial recognition technology
| tracks you across all 50 locations, with an "anonymized"
| identifier attached to your biometrics. This identifier can be
| cross-referenced with other "anonymized" identifiers to build
| an advertising profile, while another contractor's machine
| learning system builds a threat profile based on movements of
| these identifiers, flagging outliers for human review.
|
| Both scenarios have the same number of cameras, but I don't
| think many would consider the two comparable.
| [deleted]
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Worth thinking about how the scenarios converge when a few
| companies capture the commercial surveillance market and
| everything is streamed directly to a cloud storage account.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| And this. Which is EXACTLY what Ring figured out and so
| they took all those doorbell cameras, gave local law
| enforcement access, and now even on residential streets
| there are hundreds of cameras they have easy access too.
| dmix wrote:
| Ring is evil and all, but since we have a problem with
| them one of us genius hackers should make a product that
| has the functionality and critically the same UX but...
| doesn't use the 'cloud'.
|
| The sharing with LEO will always then be optionally and
| at your option, which still provides a similar net
| security benefit.
|
| Purely localized home storage and IOT stuff which offers
| similar features like remote access and whatnot, is
| clearly a really, really difficult problem to solve. Just
| like smartphone being essentially your entire one ISP
| coordinated popping from having your whole life in any
| security agencies hands.
|
| Maybe we need an organization like OpenAI to solve this
| problem. Like OpenHome or something. A place we can
| centralize our developer resources to providing a
| solution to this obvious proto-police state that is being
| developed out of pure utility, aka usefulness.
|
| Right now my friends moms washing machine and coffee
| maker are all wifi connected to be controlled and
| notified when done remotely from here phone. It's
| entering out lives fast and we need a solution and
| startups offering similarlly good products - or a private
| solution which can be sold to the manufacturers like
| Whirlpool.
| godelski wrote:
| Doesn't Ubiquity have this functionality? I think part of
| the problem though is setting up the servers, which can
| be a bit pricey. Not many people have NASs, despite them
| becoming much cheaper and easier to set up. It is hard to
| compete with the simplicity of cloud platforms. A full
| home operation still requires you to have the drives
| stored somewhere.
|
| I think the better solution is that someone offers a
| relatively cheap service that has a cloud option that
| fully encrypts the data and uses e2ee for communication
| to the server. Though it is hard to prove that you don't
| own the keys (I mean how many still distrust Signal?).
| godelski wrote:
| I actually feel uncomfortable with both scenarios (though
| obviously _substantially_ more with B). I think the question
| comes down to how much you trust your government /leaders (or
| future gov/leaders). I believe in the west distrust is
| correlated with the rise of authoritarianism. Which with
| those two correlating I'm actually more concerned because the
| _potential_ for that power to be abused. I do not think the
| west is immune to dictators or autocrats, and far from immune
| to those in power abusing that power. To me surveillance
| hinders free speech, I mean isn 't this the theme of 1984?
| (Many forget that it isn't that the government was always
| watching, but _could_.) It makes it more difficult to
| vocalize our feelings about abuse of power and makes it
| difficult to share messages conveying as much. We should feel
| free to communicate and criticize, and surveillance is one
| means to suppress that communication.
| mattferderer wrote:
| I'm surprised Nest, Ring, Facebook or someone else hasn't
| started offering free security cameras & storage to select
| businesses yet to accomplish better advertising data for
| Scenario B.
| noncoml wrote:
| > London is not like living in some police state
|
| I lived there for 7 years and I don't share the same feelings.
| Sure it's not like you live in 1984 but it feels much more like
| a "police state" in comparison to the rest European capitals.
| mmm_grayons wrote:
| You can get tossed in prison for saying the "wrong thing",
| which strikes me as a pretty police state thing.
|
| Examples:
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-man-jailed-over-facebook-
| sta...
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-offensive-
| face...
|
| https://thesuffolkjournal.com/26253/opinion/detainment-of-
| br...
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/count-dankula-
| freedom-s...
| swebs wrote:
| >On Feb. 9, The Daily Mail in the U.K. published a story
| detailing the harrowing detainment of 38-year-old Kate
| Scottow. Scottow, a resident of Hertfordshire, England, was
| handcuffed in front of her autistic ten-year-old daughter
| and breastfeeding 20-month-old son, brought into custody
| and held for seven hours in a single jail cell.
|
| >What heinous action warranted such drastic measures? The
| crime of "misgendering," or calling a transgender
| individual by their biologically determined set of pronouns
| instead of their preferred pronouns, precipitated Scottow's
| arrest. Stephanie Hayden, a biological male who recently
| transitioned to identifying as female on social media,
| reported Scottow to the police.
|
| If you would have tried to tell people 10 years ago that
| this actually happened, people would have thought you were
| crazy, or accuse you of promoting the slippery slope
| fallacy.
| markb139 wrote:
| In the context of London and the UK "get tossed in prison"
| has an alternative meaning
| donaltroddyn wrote:
| .
| baby wrote:
| Not saying that surveillance is right, but I've lived in
| London for a year and a half and never felt this way, I don't
| think I've ever talked to someone who felt this way there,
| you must be a very paranoid individual.
|
| I will say this though: having lived in both Beijing and
| London, I've always felt ultra safe (and I lived in London
| during some terrorist attacks). On the other hand, I lived in
| SF for the same time and I never felt safe there, avoiding
| walks at night, avoiding public transport for the most part,
| avoiding some streets, etc. I also lived in Chicago and I
| felt much worse there (at least in SF I could still take
| walks).
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Not to discount your feelings completely, but I'm always a
| little skeptical when someone says a place "feels" safe or
| unsafe. Do you have reason to believe you actually _were_
| less safe in San Francisco compared to London?
| noncoml wrote:
| On the other hand, although I find driving in SF much more
| stressful and confusing than London(despite being a native
| RHT driver), I never managed to get a ticket in SF. Every
| time I visit London I keep getting letters with some
| bullshit traffic violation captured by a camera for months
| after I am back.
|
| Also having lived in London for 7 years, I can't say I felt
| safe walking at night other than in the very central
| places. Try visiting Elephant and Castle or Seven Sisters
| alone during the night.
|
| Edit: spelling
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > although I find driving in SF much more stressful and
| confusing than London(despite being a native RHT driver),
| I never managed to get a ticket in SF.
|
| Did you ever park outside a parking garage?
| donaltroddyn wrote:
| .
| monksy wrote:
| > I also lived in Chicago and I felt much worse there (at
| least in SF I could still take walks).
|
| Depends where you are and what times.
|
| 3am on the redline in the northside.. Be ready to move at
| a moments notice.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Would London or Beijing turn into a Chicago or SF if it
| weren't for CCTV?
|
| Would Chi or SF become a London or Beijing with CCTV?
|
| Doubtful to both. But a lot can be explained by social
| determinants of wealth and what that turns people into.
| Google234 wrote:
| Why is baby's response flagged and dead ?!?!?? He
| literally just gave his perspective as a person living in
| that city. The people that flagged them should be banned
| from this site.
| detaro wrote:
| I assume they took offence with the "you must be very
| paranoid" just because someone feels odd about
| surveillance. It certainly seems pretty rude to me.
| [deleted]
| seppin wrote:
| > This is not obvious to me. London subjectively feels like
| an oppressively surveilled and policed city to me any time I
| spend time there, and avoid it for that reason.
|
| Spend some time in a real autocracy, then see if you feel the
| same way.
| [deleted]
| bleepblorp wrote:
| > Obviously living in London is not like living in some police
| state.
|
| In recent years, the police in London had a policy to harass
| anyone who was seen using a camera in a large, but completely
| unpublished, geofenced region of the city. That's not
| US/China/Saudi-level police state bad--as in, the UK police
| aren't able to arbitrarily confiscate cash or shoot people with
| impunity for having the wrong skin color--but it's bad enough
| that I consider such behavior a feature of a police state.
|
| Any jurisdiction where it's not possible to perform the normal
| functions of everyday life, including creating works of art
| through photography, without fear of hostile police interaction
| is to some degree or other a police state.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Is that this case, from 10 years ago?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/dec/15/yates-police-
| terr...
| qz2 wrote:
| I've had a couple of run-on this front. I spent a couple of
| years photographing industrial landscapes in London. Unless
| you are trespassing then you can tell them to hop it. Being
| arrested wrongfully is quite profitable for the receiver of
| the arrest and they are usually intimidated by reminding them
| of that in return.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I, and many people I know, have been the victims of property
| crimes and other crimes several times over in Seattle. The
| understaffed police force (meaning per-capita officer counts well
| below median) are unable to investigate these crimes and so
| perpetrators are never identified and arrested. This is because
| violent crimes take priority and so there simply isn't enough
| staffing to devote time to other crimes.
|
| Surveillance and facial recognition could help our police force
| effectively put this limited staff to use, so that criminals face
| consequences and crime is deterred. I have no problem using
| technology to enforce existing law effectively, just as I have no
| problem with cops using cell phones or vehicles to do their job.
| I do find the dystopian extent of how these technologies are used
| in China (e.g. social scores) to be unacceptable, but we can
| institute the right regulations around these technologies to
| prevent broader abuse while still retaining the benefits (a
| cheaper and more effective police force).
| [deleted]
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Is there a distinction between privately run and state run CCTV?
|
| Do Ring doorbells count in the survey, or is this just for the
| cameras that are monitored directly from the state police
| bunkers?
| sschueller wrote:
| I don't think even Orwell thought people would actually pay
| private enterprises to install listening devices (Amazon Echo
| etc.) and cloud connected surveillance video (Ring etc.)
| devices in their homes.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > Where possible, we have only included public CCTV cameras,
| including cameras installed on public buildings, cameras used
| by law enforcement, cameras installed on public transport, and
| traffic cameras with surveillance capabilities (i.e. automatic
| number plate recognition). However, in some instances, it may
| not be clear what cameras are included, meaning some private
| camera figures may also be included in the totals. We believe
| this may be the case for London and Sydney.
|
| https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Iunno, but if anything, state-run CCTV has a lot more
| accountability in most countries than anything private run.
| neom wrote:
| Here is the data they used:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I-WpH2KOiguKy9JTQ9zC...
| borg_ wrote:
| How is cutting off at "150 most populated cities" relevant for
| this comparison?
|
| Out of the 150 cities, 39 or 26% of them are in China making the
| candidate pool quite imbalanced to start with?
|
| Going by the same data, we could also claim that:
|
| "The Safest Cities in the World"
|
| Qingdao China 7.42
|
| Wuxi China 7.84
|
| Hefei China 11.03
|
| Nagoya Japan 11.21
|
| Nanjing China 13.31
|
| Ningbo China 14.75
|
| Ji'nan China 15.79
|
| Suzhou China 16.63
|
| Dalian China 17.53
|
| Fukuoka Japan 18.59
|
| Xiamen China 19.09
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