Depends on where you live. Where I live, I know for a fact they have less than 1TB of storage for 1000 cameras, and law enforcement usually fights the city to get images of incidents, because they don't live over a day due to storage shortage.
Let me tell you a story from about 10 years ago. I was working for the DOJ and was invited to one of their secure datacenter (I was cleared). As we are walking through hallways, we sometimes had to cross through rooms of racks of servers to get to other server rooms. As we walked through past these racks of servers, I noticed they all said EMC on the cages. My coworker points out each room we walk through is housing storage and measuring a single server room alone, you'd find they were pushing a few petabytes. Just imagine what their storage solution looks like now. Thats just the DOJ.
Another story.. 15 years ago, not many people had a digital camera. Almost overnight, everyone and their mom had a digital camera. My dog has a camera.
If you think your image is not captured and stored somewhere for a near indefinite period of time, then you are just fooling yourself. 1984 came and went and we didn't even notice we're living a brave new world now
I can simultaneously believe both you and dr_zoidberg, just as I can believe the homophobic totalitarian dictatorships of the Soviet Union were simultaneous with the 60s summer of love and Denmark decriminalising all pornography. They did say it “depends on where you live”.
While I think this is great for generally alleviating the creepiness of surveillance while keeping the benefits, why do they have such little storage? I'd have thought storing it would be the easy part compared to maintaining the whole systems.