> pervasive CCTV and face recognition.
I'm willing to wager there is no country on the planet that comes within an order of magnitude in terms of their awareness of precisely where any given resident is to within a few meters.
In fact - I think we would struggle to find a country within 2 orders of magnitude - the combination of incredibly high technology, super density, lack of much in the way of "countryside" (and the jungles/parks have lots of camera's near the entrances) and a general societal consensus that omnipresent surveillance is worthwhile exchange for the world's safest country all come together to create a system in which you don't need to worry about obscuring who you are dating with/sleeping with/associating with.
The Government already knows, always has known.
The UK? It doesn't have a special relationship with surveillance companies, it just has a population that seems to like being surveilled and always votes for more.
Because of this reason, quite a lot of people
- don't actually own a mobile phone,
- formally own a mobile phone, but only carry it around if the likelihood is very high that they will need it
- if they need to be available via mobile phone for job reasons (and are thus survived), they prefer to use a feature phone or if it must be a smart phone, they don't install any additional apps or remove the additional surveillance functions from the operating system as far as easily possible
(I use 'weirdo' as a technical term here. These people have my sympathies; I just mean that they are far from the average or normal person.)
So not much of an extra loss in privacy.