The southern city of Nice – France’s fifth largest city, in terms of population – is today the most closely guarded in France with more than 3,000 CCTV cameras.
In 2008, its mayor, Christian Estrosi, made digital surveillance a priority. In 2016, after the attacks of July 14 which left 86 people dead in Nice, he took a new step and relied on more intrusive technologies.
The city uses several automatic image analysis software packages. The community has installed dozens of alert buttons at local merchants and attempted to deploy a reporting application. Nice was the first city to have experimented with facial recognition in France in 2019. The city was also involved in a failed facial recognition project in high schools.