Many councils collect footage via CCTV cameras. Providing the raw data from these cameras would enable many useful activities to be carried out that are outside the scope of the each council's responsibility

There are many areas that could benefit from providing this data:

1. people are fearful of surveillance
2. there isn't enough data for machine learning research
3. crime monitoring is labour intensive
4. it's hard to gather info for petty crime
5. other uses

1. there would be a greater awareness of exactly what is being recorded, which should lessen anxiety levels

2. it would enable researchers and companies to have data for computer vision projects, such as facial recognition, automated crime monitoring and other forms of biometrics

3. it could enable crowdsourced security- citizens could potentially look over the many hours of footage looking for criminal or suspicious activity. If they find something, it could be flagged for further scrutiny by authorities.

4. petty crime is often unreported and CCTV footage is expensive to look over. If the data could be made more widely available, it could potentially mean that the cost of using the footage as evidence reduces.

5. the data could be useful for: bird surveys, pedestrian usage surveys and so forth