[Animats]

Sure the West and China are both turning into biometric dystopias buuuuuuuut ours delivers fried chicken to your train seat. - Naomi Wu, Shenzhen.

For some railroad lines in China, you can order food while on a train and have it delivered to you at a station. That requires finding the passenger quickly, so some combination of cell phone tracking and face recognition is used.[1] KFC is using this system.

China's approach to Big Brother is more like a service function. The Government knows who you are and what you're doing, but China has been like that for centuries. There's no tradition of anonymity. The older paper-based systems worked when people didn't move much. The newer technology is being used to provide routine services, such as convenience store checkout and finding purse snatchers.

London has a lot of cameras, but many of them are old, so they have poor resolution. Newer 4K surveillance cameras [2] finally have enough resolution to be useful for recognizing faces at 40 feet or so.

[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-07/13/content_300925... [2] https://www.lorextechnology.com/articles/What-is-4k-Video/R-...