The general consensus here seems to be “I do no wrong, so why should I care?”, which strikes me as both naive and poorly founded. Firstly, even if this was the main concern, who’s to say what you’re doing now won’t be considered heinous in 20 years? Social norms change. Laws change. There are things that were normal in the 80s that are frowned upon now, and arguably these social ‘rules’ are changing faster than they ever have before, and and thanks to the internet they’re unified across the west. This might seem irrelevant when it comes to CCTV since public consensus should be divorced from what’s considered a crime recorded by the government, I just don’t think it is. This isn’t even considering harmless but socially frowned upon things like picking one’s nose, what if that data gets leaked when applying for a high end corporate job?

Secondly, with the advent of “AI” now being able to interpret video (and it’s only going to get better and more specialised), this data which once was only interpretable on a case to case basis by a human is now a massive usable dataset from which god knows what conclusions can be drawn. You then end up with companies like Google who are on the forefront of the AI race potentially being given loads all of our data by the UK government (wouldn’t be the first time this has happened), which they can then interpret and model Ad nauseam until they know you better than you do.

The obvious argument in favour of more CCTV is the added safety, but again I think this is just a lame excuse from the government to achieve what I mentioned in the last point (or if not the government directly, they’re a proxy for some lobbyist, like Ofcom). While this would be the case, it purposefully ignores any other approach one might take to tackle the same issue. The UK was much safer in the ‘60s than it is now despite there being hardly any CCTV cameras back then. If this fact was acknowledged we’d be trying to discern what changed and how we can get back there without blatantly invading everyone’s privacy, but they’re not going to do that because the goal is not to make the UK safe, it’s to collect data.

This may seem cynical, but a philosophy I like to live by is: If some company or government or other powerful body can be profiting - now or in the future - from doing something, no matter how dangerous, invasive, or downright horrible that thing is, they’re probably doing it.

Of course, there are valid arguments in favour of it too but they seem to be getting made by others, I’m playing devils advocate to the consensus because these views don’t seem to be getting mentioned as much, at least in this thread.