In The Village

How well are all those cameras working out for Britain? Apparently not so good:

Privacy activists are worried that Britain will become the bleak totalitarian society George Orwell painted in his classic novel “1984,” where citizens were spied on and personal freedom sacrificed for the benefit of an all-powerful state.

“We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society where we’re watched from control rooms by anonymous people, says Emma Carr of the BBW. “The worrying thing is that we don’t actually know how many CCTV cameras there are out there."
....

The civil rights group Liberty estimates that the average Londoner is captured on camera around 300 times a day while BBW claims Britain has 20 percent of the world’s CCTV cameras and only 1 percent of the world’s population.

There is a perception that the cameras reduce the crime rate, but there is no evidence for that, say activists. “The Met police have said that in 2008, only one crime was solved for every 1,000 CCTV cameras,” says Carr.

Of course, some are fine with this:

“I’ve never really thought about them,” says Jane Taylor who commutes this route to work. “They’re not particularly obtrusive and I think it’s a good thing especially at night to think someone is keeping an eye on things.”

Nadine Shah, a bank worker, agrees. “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about have you? If they deter crime and help the police I don’t see that being a problem. People say it’s like ‘1984’ but it’s a long way from that.”

Until it happens to you, that is...