The streets of San Francisco are not only sunnier, quieter and grubbier than London’s, they are noticeably less covered in CCTV cameras. US cities lack the sort of blanket surveillance of public spaces that Londoners are used to. That doesn’t mean you are not being watched.

Instead of cameras on every street corner, there are cameras on doorbells. In the last building I lived in, two neighbours had installed cameras on their front doors. Every time I left or came home I was recorded by someone else’s security system. On a quiet street in a quiet part of town, it felt excessive.

Why is this sort of oversight tolerated when civil liberty groups fight so hard against government surveillance? In 2019, for example, San Francisco became the first major city to ban local government agencies’ use of facial recognition software.