From Sky News 27/07/2020
'Eighteen of the top 20 cities for surveillance cameras are in China.
London has the third-highest number of CCTV cameras of any city in the world - and is the only one in the West in the global top 20, new figures reveal.
The capital has 627,727 cameras for 9.3 million residents - the equivalent of 67.5 cameras per 1,000 people, data compiled by Comparitech shows.
It [London] is the only city in the top 20 apart from Hyderabad, India, that is outside of China.
Taiyuan in northeast China has the most surveillance in the world, according to the data, with 119.6 cameras for every 1,000 people.
Wuxi, near Shanghai, in eastern China, is second on the list, with 92.1 cameras for every 1,000 people.
Hyderabad in southern India comes in at 16th with 30 cameras for every 1,000 people.
Other Chinese cities to feature on the list include the capital Beijing, financial hub Shanghai, tech centre Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Harbin and Chengdu.'
Copyright Sky news & Comparitech 2020
Comment:
Having looked at the data used by Comparitech, I am astonished at this conclusion by Sky. It's just lazy reporting to get a decent headline I suppose. The full report (here) does make mention of the number of cameras being 'public and private' in relation to London, but no-where can I see any individual cities identified in the dataset.
Many years back, when reporters were stating there were 4.2m CCTV cameras in the UK, the CCTV User Group did their own Member survey which showed that approximately only 189,000 cameras were operated by UK police forces and local authorities implying that over 4m were privately operated and therefore, were largely unregulated.