London Is Only The 6th Most-Surveilled City In The World
According to a study by research website Comparitech, eight out of the ten most surveilled cities in the world are in China, and as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the country that has been making headlines for its generous use of surveillance technology is featured heavily throughout the whole ranking that features 120 cities globally.
Central Chinese city Chongqing tops the list with 168 public CCTV cameras per 1,000 inhabitants.
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The highest-ranked non-Chinese city is London, also notorious for its strict surveillance of public spaces, but at 68 cameras per 1,000 Londoners, the city is featuring far less CCTV cameras than its Chinese counterparts.
Atlanta is the highest-ranked U.S. city and comes in tenth with 15.6 cameras per 1,000 people.
CCTV technology is controversial in many places around the world, with proponents touting its benefits for fighting crime and opponents cautious about surveillance’s potential to be used as a tool of public control and to violate privacy rights. The makers of the survey said that they found no connection between lower crime rates or a heightened feeling of security and surveillance in the cities surveyed.
