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Absolutely. The author of the article lives in London, which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!), but there's no way they'd write a s

Absolutely. The author of the article lives in London, which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!), but there's no way they'd write a similar article about a Western country.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Have you checked ? I have the opposite expectation...
Jedd 5y ago
> Absolutely. The author of the article lives in London, which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!), but there's no way they'd write a similar article about a Western country. Are you asserting this because you've researched all the articles that Peter Guest has written, or because you just don't think he would? A starting point on RestOfWorld - the site's name kind of gives away the focus for their reporting, so it's probably a skewed subset: https://restofworld.org/author/peter-guest/ https://restofworld.org/author/peter-guest/
foldr 5y ago
>which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!) These cameras are mostly privately owned. They're not part of a police surveillance system. Bear in mind that the Metropolitan Police only has about 33,000 officers. Even if they all spent all day watching surveillance footage, they wouldn't get anywhere close to looking at the footage from all of those cameras. What happens in practice is that lazy (or overworked) police officers will occasionally bother to retrieve CCTV footage that might be relevant to solving a crime. I can see why people feel creeped out by CCTV cameras if they're not used to them. However, painting London as some sort of hypersurveillance environment isn't true to life (at least in my experience of living there). It's also worth adding that CCTV is an almost absurdly inefficient means of spying on people if you actually have malicious intentions. We all now carry personal tracking devices that are immeasurably more useful for this purpose.

Absolutely. The author of the article lives in London, which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!), but there's no way they'd write a similar article about a Western country.

BlueTemplar 5y ago

Have you checked ? I have the opposite expectation...

Jedd 5y ago

> Absolutely. The author of the article lives in London, which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!), but there's no way they'd write a similar article about a Western country. Are you asserting this because you've researched all the articles that Peter Guest has written, or because you just don't think he would? A starting point on RestOfWorld - the site's name kind of gives away the focus for their reporting, so it's probably a skewed subset: https://restofworld.org/author/peter-guest/ https://restofworld.org/author/peter-guest/

foldr 5y ago

>which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!) These cameras are mostly privately owned. They're not part of a police surveillance system. Bear in mind that the Metropolitan Police only has about 33,000 officers. Even if they all spent all day watching surveillance footage, they wouldn't get anywhere close to looking at the footage from all of those cameras. What happens in practice is that lazy (or overworked) police officers will occasionally bother to retrieve CCTV footage that might be relevant to solving a crime. I can see why people feel creeped out by CCTV cameras if they're not used to them. However, painting London as some sort of hypersurveillance environment isn't true to life (at least in my experience of living there). It's also worth adding that CCTV is an almost absurdly inefficient means of spying on people if you actually have malicious intentions. We all now carry personal tracking devices that are immeasurably more useful for this purpose.