> I mean, doesn't London already have cameras at every street corner for instance ?

I'm concerned about things like these in the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Act_2017#React...

This is exactly what comes up when the police run a plate.

The only difference is facial recognition vs numbers and letters.

Querying for more invasive information such as medical history, sexual orientation, online accounts, "undesirable people" they are acquainted with) is a simple as a DB connection string and a select statement.

Except that not everyone has a license plate but everyone has a face. So its a much bigger intrusion.

License plates are much more unique than faces and they do not change over time and you can't put a hat and sunglasses on them. What they lose in quantity they make up in quality. They are a much bigger intrusion but for a large majority of the population instead of literally everyone. The difference isn't very meaningful from a surveillance POV since you can build shadow profiles.

Two can play at the "I don't care about your problems because they don't affect me" game.

Some people live in rural areas with little to no government infrastructure that can be used for dragnet surveillance. They don't have to care about the government tracking faces with the subway security cameras.

That's a dumb game to play. Dragnet surveillance is bad in all forms.

The UK has weird little surveillance state gameshow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunted_(2015_TV_series) - its use of CCTV is somewhat TV-artificial but supposed to be representative of real capabilities.

The Met's supposed "super recognisers" have always made me suspicious that they're cover for a recognition computer system. Also for use at protests.

In the US, many counties/cites have license plate readers installed already... Not quite as bad as facial recognition but....

We have ANPR[0] in the UK. Makes it very easy to follow vehicles around the country on main roads.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recogni...

Most cameras in the U.K. are privately owned and operated with no central system.

After watching various films where organisations are able to pull up feeds from cameras absolutely anywhere in the world, I'm wondering how long it will be before there's a mandatory internet connection and back door on all 'security' cameras sold.

The backdoors are already there. Most surveillance cameras are sold with hardcoded user accounts.

Checkout Shodan where you can look into thousands of cams around the world from parking garages, shops, and even baby cams.