I also live in the US. I think your feeling is just that.
Two of my neighbors have internet-connected surveillance cameras around their homes. There are cameras at most street lights. The police have cameras in their cars, including ones that scan license plates automatically.
I live near a school, which is festooned with cameras (and has a constant police presence, too, with their car and body cameras). The stores I shop at have cameras mounted everywhere, mostly behind shaded plastic globes so they're not obvious. (Small businesses tend to have fewer cameras, but still have them.) ATMs have cameras, as do gas stations. My workplace has cameras at entrances, elevators, stairwells and hallways.
And that's before we get into cellphones, Facebook and government surveillance, or the advertising- and data-mining-driven stalkerware that haunts you on the internet.
It is not that you are trusted to do the right thing. It's just that until you somehow gain the attention of some persons or powers with access to all that surveillance, they don't care what you do.
>The faces and ID cards of Xinjiang residents are scanned.
>Near the Xinjiang University campus in Urumqi, police sat at a wooden table recently, ordering some people walking by to hand over their phones.
Hm. I live in the US. Our police have no cameras. None on the streets, none around the vast majority of homes. None in the schools. Shops have fake ones behind plastic globes (that's why the globes are there; so you don't know that all but 1 or two by the door are fake). Businesses have none.
Two of my neighbors have internet-connected surveillance cameras around their homes. There are cameras at most street lights. The police have cameras in their cars, including ones that scan license plates automatically.
I live near a school, which is festooned with cameras (and has a constant police presence, too, with their car and body cameras). The stores I shop at have cameras mounted everywhere, mostly behind shaded plastic globes so they're not obvious. (Small businesses tend to have fewer cameras, but still have them.) ATMs have cameras, as do gas stations. My workplace has cameras at entrances, elevators, stairwells and hallways.
And that's before we get into cellphones, Facebook and government surveillance, or the advertising- and data-mining-driven stalkerware that haunts you on the internet.
It is not that you are trusted to do the right thing. It's just that until you somehow gain the attention of some persons or powers with access to all that surveillance, they don't care what you do.