A free walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle points out every camera, sensor, and tracker watching downtown and tells you what each one actually does. It is self-guided and about 1.3 miles. You can also do the whole thing from a chair, because every stop is pinned on a map with Google Street View. The privacy group Coveillance built it and first ran it as two pilot workshops with the Tech Equity Coalition and the ACLU of Washington in October 2019.
Cameras you walk past every day
The first stop is the most ordinary one. The guide points to a camera at 523 Union St and makes a simple point. Once you start counting them, you cannot stop.
A camera is never just a camera. It records, and that footage piles up into a long memory of who walked by and when. Many cameras can be aimed, zoomed, or raised by someone sitting somewhere else. If the camera is online, the feed can go anywhere, the controls can come from anywhere, and anyone with access can watch. The footage can also be run through software for patterns and handed to private companies or local police.
The store with no cashiers
A 2020 stop was an Amazon Go store at 2131 7th Ave, the cashier-less kind where you scan in at a gate and walk out. Amazon's Just Walk Out system used cameras and sensors to track what you picked up and bill you for it. Amazon has since said it is closing its Amazon Go stores, but the lesson holds. The same setup that skips the checkout line also logs what you browsed.
What you buy can be turned into guesses about you. The guide's example is blunt. Buy Hanukkah decorations and a system can tag you as Jewish. Buy certain foods and it can read that as a sign of a health condition. Pair that with your online order history, which Amazon already has, and the picture gets sharper.
Those guesses are often wrong, sometimes in ugly ways. The guide points to Google Photos once labeling photos of Black people as "gorilla." Shoppers get almost no view into any of this. Amazon's privacy notice says it does not sell personal information but does share it in certain cases. That gap, between what gets collected and what you are allowed to know, is the real point of the stop.
A sidewalk hits harder than a report
Walking the route lands harder than reading a privacy report. Counting the lenses pointed at you on a real sidewalk is not the same as skimming a list of them. The guide pushes that at every stop with questions like what kind of society this builds, and who the cameras watch hardest.
The authors are upfront about the limits. They call the page a work in progress, say they sourced it as carefully as they could, and admit it has not been professionally fact-checked. Treat it as a reason to look closer, not a legal document, and the walk does its job.
