> The presence of the cameras is a marker for what's going wrong with government and society. That the state is imposing the surveillance on us.
I'll point out that the vast, vast majority of the UK's CCTV cameras are privately owned and installed, not connected together, but having worked in retail positions, an awful lot of them aren't even working or turned on and used soley for deterrance.
Like, going by this: https://clarionuk.com/resources/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-in... (which may or may not be accurate, looks like they did their work on it), cameras controlled by the Metropolitan Police, local councils and TfL come to less than 10% of the total.
Yes, if the public didn't accept it, then the insurance companies would not be able to get away with imposing it on us.
Maybe the state was the first to introduce the cameras, once the public got accustomed to them, then private actors were able to get away with it afterwards?
We also have the TfL London Underground and National Rail cameras, which are very likely to be linked to Police systems. Public transit is where people's movements can be tracked very effectively.
And we now have services such as Facewatch where these private cameras are networked. And the Ring doorbell cameras. No idea what intelligence agencies might be doing with that data? Running facial recognition on every video stream? Just as they did with people's webcam images (from the Snowden leaks).
The Amazon Ring camera might be a NSA, GHCQ or even an FBI camera "masquerading as a home surveillance device". They only need to process the images when motion is detected, which makes things a lot simpler.
And Amazon does have a lot of contracts with the government for cloud computing services. They wouldn't want to lose those, would they? So it's a distinct possibility, given what we learned from the Snowden leaks.
I'll point out that the vast, vast majority of the UK's CCTV cameras are privately owned and installed, not connected together, but having worked in retail positions, an awful lot of them aren't even working or turned on and used soley for deterrance.
Like, going by this: https://clarionuk.com/resources/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-in... (which may or may not be accurate, looks like they did their work on it), cameras controlled by the Metropolitan Police, local councils and TfL come to less than 10% of the total.
Blame insurance companies, not the state.