The use of CCTV later on became identical commonplace in banks and stores to discourage theft, by recording evidence of criminal activity. Their use further popularised the concept. The first place to applicability CCTV in the Security Cameras United Kingdom was King's Lynn, Norfolk.
CCTV critics see the most disturbing extension to this technology as the recognition of faces from high-definition CCTV images. This could determine a person's identity without alerting him that his identity is being checked and logged. The systems can check many thousands of faces in a database in under a second.