Social media users have been left shocked after a woman exposed a "creepy" detail about a beach in China.
When visiting the beach, most people expect to be left to their own devices, albeit not expecting too much privacy with hundreds of people around them.
However, one TikToker has revealed that people using certain beaches in China have to get used to something pretty unusual - which may not go down well with all.
Have a look at the viral clip below:
Taking to TikTok, user @louiserct, AKA Louise, an exchange student in China, decided to post a video taken on Haitang Bay to show her followers the amount of surveillance cameras dotted around on the beach.
A text overlay reads: "POV [point of view] you're at the beach in China OF COURSE there are security cameras every 50 meters [164 feet]."
In the caption, the TikToker also added: "We're at the beach in China of course we aren’t allowed to swim in the ocean."
Hundreds took to the caption to leave their thoughts on the possibility of the government watching people's every move.
"Every low trust communities have these. here in my country we have like a 100 of those every square meter istg," wrote one user while another added: "Reminds me of my visit to miami in the USA, cameras everywhere."
A third even described the entire thing as "creepy" writing: "The amount of cameras in China is creepy."
Others actually held the opposite opinion, with this TikToker writing: "That would make me feel safe tbh."
And this user also added: "We need some of this in Brazil."
There are many prominent voices that stand against the surveillance of the country including Josh Chin and Liza Lin, the authors of Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social, which focuses on how China has managed to build an alternate relationship with its citizens.
"China is probably the only country out there that hopes to use surveillance to create this techno-utopian state," Lin said in 2022, just weeks after the release of the book. "And as we mentioned in our research and in the book, China has this ambition to use the data collected to analyze any future threats to its governance and to identify these threats quickly and do something about it, to create an alternative model to what democracy could offer."
She went on to detail the extent to which the nation is watched by its government.
"I think the difference between China and many other countries is that all these cameras are largely state-owned," Lin continued. "Unlike in the US, where you have a ton of Amazon ring cameras that are privately owned, a lot of the surveillance cameras that you see on the street in China are owned by government agencies and largely by the Chinese police."
Lin also stated that this isn't just limited to the cameras and instead stretches into people's households.
"...Beyond access to those 400 million cameras, the Chinese government still has access to about a billion smartphones that the Chinese citizens use," she said before adding: "And that’s because there are a series of national security and intelligence laws that were put in place in China over the last decade that actually allow the Chinese government to have access to a lot of the information that Chinese tech companies collect."
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