Revealed: the world’s most surveilled cities of 2024?

By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner

What was the most surveilled city in the world last year? Beijing? London? Maybe Lotsee, Oklahoma (wouldn’t that be fun).

We like our ratings and rating our Likes all year round, but now is the time when every headline lists towards league tables: ‘the year’s top movies’, ‘most downloaded recipe’, ‘the least interesting biometric articles’.  Technology has fed our love of taxonomies but that same tech has made surveillance rankings all but meaningless.

True, there are many lists claiming to reveal the ‘World’s Most Surveilled Cities’; there was even a BBC Top 20 with London coming in at 3rd place and most of the others reassuringly located in China. But, despite their tone of forensic certainty, these lists aren’t proof of much. Totting the most surveilled places on Earth is calculating the incalculable – you may as well label a city the World’s Most Digitally Profligate because there is no reliable way of measuring either (in some ways they’re the same thing).

Sure, dividing camera sightings by recorded population will give you mathematical comfort but it won’t tell you how many people were under state surveillance in 2024. Equally, you could put the estimated number of visible and working cameras covering public spaces over miles squared but that’s not the same as how many times or in what depth that area was observed.

In the UK, counting street cameras tells you virtually nothing. The majority are operated by local authorities, many aren’t working or watched and they’re not the only, or even principal, source of surveillance data. You’d do better counting street-facing doorbells. You could always ask the police and councils how many surveillance cameras they have but when I did this in a national survey in 2023, most didn’t know and some didn’t answer. This is not surprising, nor is it very relevant as police forces now get a lot of their images from us. Driven by techno-convenience, we are feverishly recording everywhere and uploading images without even agreeing at what point ‘surveillance’ takes place (if a tree falls in a forest with unmonitored CCTV, is it under surveillance?).

Internet scrapers might have some idea of how many selfies – and images of passers-by – were uploaded at, say, the Trevi fountain, ESB, Familia Sagrada or Sydney Opera House last year and of course there are lists of ‘the World’s Most Photographed Tourist Attractions’ (most of them different). But how should we calibrate all this snapping and streaming and sharing in our end-of-year lookback? The volume of citizen-generated surveillance in cities isn’t yet known or knowable but it’s almost certainly increasing year on year.

To figure out who was subject to the most surveillance and where, you’d have to factor in features such as multiple recording devices in hundreds of thousands of vehicles wending their way through our cities, but no one knows how much data they hold about people and places. Then there are Automated Number Plate Readers (ANPR) – the national system for UK policing alone claims more hits-per-second than Instagram. And don’t forget the drones, body-worn cameras and smart tools at work in, around, above and below our cities.

Combining social media analytics with other mass surveillance capabilities like call record metadata, biometrics-based financial services, mobile driver’s licences and digital ID wallets would give us a less wrong guesstimate than visible camera infrastructure but we’d still be a long way from podium territory.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle for the title of ‘most-watched’ is that surveillance doesn’t need to be a) located in, or b) visible from a city in order to look at it and its inhabitants. If you’re unsure about this ask the military. With satellite surveillance, pretty much everywhere can be watched from somewhere – which is also bad news for fans of that other surveillance favourite ‘Things Visible from Space’.

So how do we compare a Google Maps camera car upload from a quiet Spanish street which becomes evidence in a homicide investigation, with the static CCTV staring blankly at a patch of pavement in a capital city? The answer is simple: we can’t.

Uncounted billions of images and other surveillance reference points are being, or will be captured and shared across thousands of cities, this year, next year and every year to come. When all this data needed a human to join the dots it wasn’t much use; no one was going to live long enough to get through it. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed that, alchemizing digital chaff into surveillance gold. Privacy advocates resort to Orwell’s fiction when highlighting risks; the reality is more like Bentham’s panopticon, except the ‘building’ is the world and we, the population, are its interns.

Apart from corroborating our love of lists, ranking the ‘Most Surveilled’ cities illustrates one thing: a misunderstanding of our technologically interconnected lives. Pinpointing areas or people that were surveilled (that seems to be a verb now) has so many variables and we can’t access the data needed to compare them. Rating them does nothing to promote understanding of surveillance, still less its regulation.

A more useful list would be one containing the standards by which the state will be held to account for its use of AI-enabled surveillance capability – from satellites to dashcams; at CENTRIC we are working with citizens and law enforcement in many different countries to compile it.

Our New Year’s resolution is to shift the focus from countability to accountability, to find which cities have the greatest level of surveillance awareness or the best AI transparency ratings for their police.

Nominations for 2025 are now open…

About the author

Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  Fraser Sampson  |  video surveillance