Street View Surveillance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Spot the Surveillance game is a virtual reality game which requires players to identify surveillance equipment in a panoramic image of a San Francisco street scene. Panning around this 360 degree view players are required to detect the every day surveillance equipment which is now routinely used on America's streets, such as body-worn cameras, automated license plate readers, drones, and pan-tilt-zoom cameras.

Spot the Surveillance is best played with a virtual reality headset but can be played using a standard computer browser as well. In the standard browser version of the game you simply need to click on any surveillance tech that you can spot and an information window will open confirming your guess and explaining how that tech is used.

I believe that Spot the Surveillance was originally released in 2020 but I only discovered it today via The Markup's report on A Virtual Reality Tour of Surveillance Tech at the Border. In this article Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation takes Monique O. Madan of The Markup on a virtual reality tour of the U.S.–Mexico border. 

The article includes a list of links to Google Maps Street View panoramas from a number of locations along the border, all of which contain examples of US Border Patrol surveillance technology in action.

Of course the U.S. isn't the only country in the world where surveillance technology has become ubiquitous. Surfshank's Surveillance Cities examines the density of surveillance cameras in cities around the world. By calculating the number of CCTV cameras per km2 in the world's 130 most populous cities Surveillance Cities is able to make direct comparisons between different global cities. 

The article includes an interesting mapped visualization which allows you to directly compare the density of CCTV cameras in any two of the 130 cities surveyed by Surfshark. For example the screenshot above shows a comparison of the density of surveillance cameras in Los Angeles and London.