[true_religion]

> As shitty as it is, people should have the right to do something like cheat on their spouse without some government official waving the evidence in your face for compliance.

A lot of these avenues of privacy were only really enabled by the growth of large metropolitan areas.

In smaller districts, you can't go to the inn and sleep with another woman because the innkeeper went to highschool with you and will tell your wife.

For the vast majority of human society, you had to try a lot harder to hide your activities if you wanted to go against the current social mores. It's not really clear to me that the level of privacy we can easily attain today, even if it is a social good, is not outweighed by the group benefits of social cohesion, and newly found benefits of catching criminals after the fact that CCTV would provide/encourage.

[dTal]

The difference is that the inn keeper, a single person with no authority, a small social network, and a visual range measured in feet, is replaced by an invisible, omniscient, omnipresent organisation with the power to bring arbitrary legal troubles down on your head.

Only if all CCTV were to become publicly viewable at all times by everyone could we speak of it as a force for social cohesion, rather than a mechanism for amplifying differences in power.

[true_religion]

What I understand is that in Britain, for most cases CCTV is actually owned by private companies---like a shop will have a CCTV that watches its alleyway.

Even in the case where CCTV is owned by the government, its operated by individual city districts.

It's not a singular invisible omniscient organization.