This may come as a surprise, but it wasn’t until 2007 that the global urban population overtook the rural population. At that time, the two groups were split nearly 50/50, with around 3.3 billion people apiece.
Today, the percentage of people living in urban areas has grown to over 55%, and is expected to reach 68% by 2050. Due to this trend, many of the world’s largest cities have become home to tens of millions of people.
In response to such incredible density, governments, businesses, and households have installed countless security cameras for various purposes, including crime protection. To grasp the scale of this surveillance, Visual Capitalist’s Marcu Lu used data from a recent report by Comparitech to visualize the most surveilled cities in the world.
The List (Excluding China)
Excluding China for the time being, these are the world’s 10 most surveilled cities.
The top four cities all belong to India, which is the world’s second largest country by population. Surveillance cameras are playing a major role in the country’s efforts to reduce crimes against women.
Further down the list are cities from a variety of countries. One of these is Russia, which has expanded its use of surveillance cameras in recent years. Given the country’s track record of human rights violations, activists are worried that facial recognition technology could become a tool of oppression.
Read More: These Are The World’s Most-Surveilled Cities
