San Francisco
It’s the city where you left your heart, supposedly. San Francisco is a wonderful place to visit for many reasons (nice views, cool breeze, and a trendy bar or twenty), but it’s also a pretty terrible place for privacy. Comparitech lists SF as one of its major surveillance hubs, alleging it has a network of some 14,266 municipally operated cameras—or about 16.18 cameras per 1,000 people. Though the city did ban facial recognition in 2019, it may be headed in the opposite direction now, policy-wise. Rising crime rates have pushed officials to invest in a wealth of stupid new programs designed to stop the local tech executive’s Maserati from getting keyed: this includes a recent pilot program that will give cops live access to an extensive network of private security cameras belonging to businesses and residents.
The Bay is also home to Silicon Valley—that great and terrible Gorgon from whence surveillance capitalism and its gruesome spawn (Google, Amazon, Facebook, et al) hath sprung. Hiss!
