We Mapped 414,000 Surveillance Cameras Across 21 Countries
We built Symvek Sentinel to answer a simple question: what’s watching you?
To find out, we aggregated public data from government agencies, community mapping platforms, and open databases across 21 countries. No scraping. No hacking. No proprietary data. Everything in Sentinel comes from verified public sources.
The result: 414,093 surveillance cameras mapped worldwide. And we’re still expanding.
The data sources
OpenStreetMap contributors have tagged hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras using the man_made=surveillance tag. This is our largest single source, with particularly dense coverage in Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Government Open Data from agencies in 15+ countries: TfL London (883 JamCams), Caltrans California (3,434 cameras across 12 districts), DriveBC (1,058 highway cameras), Ontario/Alberta/Quebec 511 networks, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Leicester City Council, Austin TX, and many more. Government data is our highest-confidence source.
European Speed Camera Networks mapped via OpenStreetMap: France (60,983), Spain (10,080), Poland (9,205), Austria (5,841), Germany (4,918), and 10 more countries. Europe’s speed camera infrastructure is vast and well-documented.
The FLOCK dataset aggregates camera locations from public records in the US, including data-sharing networks between law enforcement agencies. 336,000+ cameras with inter-agency connection mapping.
EFF Atlas of Surveillance catalogs which law enforcement agencies use which surveillance technologies across 6,000+ US jurisdictions. ALPR, facial recognition, drones, ShotSpotter, body cameras, and more.
Asia-Pacific coverage includes South Korea (3,028 cameras), India (4,084), Australia (1,548 across NSW, Victoria, and more), Japan (1,784), and New Zealand (895).
After normalization and deduplication (removing cameras within 50 meters of each other), we landed at 414,093 unique surveillance points across 21 countries.
Coverage by country
| Country | Cameras | Primary Types |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 290,826 | CCTV, ALPR, facial recognition |
| France | 60,983 | Speed cameras, CCTV |
| Spain | 10,080 | Speed cameras |
| Poland | 9,205 | Speed cameras, CCTV |
| Austria | 5,841 | Speed cameras |
| United Kingdom | 5,637 | CCTV, ANPR, speed cameras |
| Germany | 4,918 | Speed cameras, Autobahn CCTV |
| India | 4,084 | CCTV, speed cameras |
| Switzerland | 4,095 | Speed cameras |
| Sweden | 3,516 | Speed cameras |
| South Korea | 3,028 | CCTV, speed cameras |
| Canada | 2,930 | Highway CCTV, traffic cameras |
| Japan | 1,784 | CCTV, speed cameras |
| Australia | 1,548 | Speed cameras, CCTV |
| Belgium | 1,438 | Speed cameras |
| Czech Republic | 1,235 | Speed cameras |
| Portugal | 987 | Speed cameras |
| New Zealand | 895 | Speed cameras, CCTV |
| Netherlands | 658 | Speed cameras, CCTV |
| Norway | 398 | Speed cameras |
| Denmark | 21 | Speed cameras |
What the data shows
351,705 are CCTV cameras. Fixed, dome, and pan-tilt-zoom installations in public and private spaces.
50,500 are speed cameras. Automated enforcement across 20 countries. France alone has more speed cameras than most countries have total surveillance points.
9,125 are ALPR readers. Automatic license plate readers that log every vehicle that passes. In the US, Flock Safety alone operates 80,000+ cameras across 49 states, scanning 20 billion plates per month. The UK has 1,226 ANPR cameras mapped.
The rest includes facial recognition systems, gunshot detection microphones, body cameras, drones, cell-site simulators, and red light cameras.
What the data doesn’t show
This is what we found in public records. The real number is much higher.
Clearview AI has indexed 70 billion faces from 3,000+ law enforcement agencies. Amazon Ring operates 20-30 million residential cameras. Retailers deploy facial recognition without disclosure. China has an estimated 600 million cameras that don’t appear in any open dataset. These don’t appear in public mapping databases.
Sentinel maps what we can verify. The invisible surveillance infrastructure is orders of magnitude larger.
What you can do
Open the map and search your address. See how many cameras are within a kilometer. Toggle the heatmap to see surveillance density patterns. Pan across Europe to see France’s speed camera density. Zoom into London or Seoul.
The map runs entirely in your browser. We never know where you looked. No analytics, no cookies, no accounts. We map the watchers. We never watch you.
What comes next
We’re expanding coverage to more countries as government open data becomes available. Italy, Finland, Singapore, and more Australian states are in the pipeline. We’re also building tools to detect surveillance devices in your physical environment, not just map the ones in public databases.
If you want to follow our progress, check back here or follow our work on the Sentinel page.
The cameras don’t go away. But now you can see them.