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As far as I know the cameras are just in public areas in Urban settings. As far as ordinary CCTV goes, they tend to be in places where either a lot of antisocial activity goes on and people have complained (e.g the town centre outside a club) or they are in areas where people face risk of attack (such as bus stations and the small linking streets in town) or they are in places where residents have clubbed together and requested the council, police or housing assoc. place them, such as snickets where there is a high rate of drug dealing or vandalism etc. The other cameras tend to be privately owned by shopping malls or businesses who wish to protect their property. There are very strict laws about what and whom can be filmed. For instance, if I were to seek permission to put a camera in my garden because I'd been targetted by vandals or something, I wuold have to angle it so that it did not look into anybody elses garden, and I don't think I'd be allowed to have it look out onto the street itself either. The police could angle one to look at the street if it was to deal with a specific problem (e.g, there's a snicket in a housing estate that teens are using as a rat run and they then cause a bunch of damage and distress for a couple of people whose gardens back onto that snicket.)
What's of far more concern to me, is the idea currently being floated about having a National database of DNA.....and I.D cards which hold massive amounts of personal and financial (and no doubt eventually political) data all available to the government. That stuff worries me far more. Cctv we've had for years and has been proved as a useful piece of technology in crime prevention and crime solving.
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