is it me or the UK is becoming some sort of a surveillance state right in front of us just like china
Yes and no.
The UK is a highly surveilled country. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country. We have Automatic Number Plate Recognition tracking cars literally everywhere. We're a part of Echelon and Five Eyes and probably a whole bunch of other things. Pretty much everything we do is tracked.
But...
That data isn't used for very much. The police actually need to request access, and generally they do without abusing it. The government doesn't (seem to) abuse the data available in nefarious ways. People can and do publish things that are very critical of the government. People protest (although those rights have been horribly eroded in the past couple of decades). The media isn't entirely on the side of the state. We don't have social surveillance with people reporting their neighbours.
So, yeah, it could be a lot better. It's not like China though (yet?).
One side-effect of that data being collected, though, is that a technologically advanced country like China could quite easily pilfer the data for their own purposes, not to mention the Five Eyes who don't even need to steal it! For actions in public anyway (like protests), that doesn't particularly matter, but it could be disastrous if anonymity is being relied on:
British investigative journalist Joe Bloggs wants to research a country's human rights abuses. Joe visits said country with a strong alibi, and covertly discovers the truth. He returns to Britain, publishing under a pseudonym a critical newspaper report exposing the matter. The British intelligence services note that he did so, not because he's under suspicion for anything but simply because they can. The country that he was researching intercepts that intelligence, learning of the journalist's pseudonym.
What do you think is going to happen to poor Joe when he revisits the country to do some more investigation?
> The United States has 15.28 CCTV cameras every 100 individuals, followed by China with 14.36 and the United Kingdom with 7.5.
You'll need to provide better citations than just saying that the UK has more CCTV cameras than anyone else, when we have less than the US or Germany, and less per capita too.
Yes and no.
The UK is a highly surveilled country. We have more CCTV cameras than any other country. We have Automatic Number Plate Recognition tracking cars literally everywhere. We're a part of Echelon and Five Eyes and probably a whole bunch of other things. Pretty much everything we do is tracked.
But...
That data isn't used for very much. The police actually need to request access, and generally they do without abusing it. The government doesn't (seem to) abuse the data available in nefarious ways. People can and do publish things that are very critical of the government. People protest (although those rights have been horribly eroded in the past couple of decades). The media isn't entirely on the side of the state. We don't have social surveillance with people reporting their neighbours.
So, yeah, it could be a lot better. It's not like China though (yet?).