I've known one of those people that watch those cameras and I'd struggle to call him a pervert. He's was just normal guy who paid his bills by doing an incredibly dull job. All it came down to was making sure that when petty shit happens in the street (drunken fights, etc), the police and so on are called to the scene.
I'm usually someone that's very fond of privacy, but I'm not entirely sure I have any qualms with CCTV in public places and in fact I'd love to hear arguments against them.
I had a friend who worked as a security guard at a factory. Sometimes I would come down and visit him in the guard shack. He showed me a controller he could use to point a security camera, and he excitedly showed me how it could be pointed and zoomed directly at the bedroom windows of several of the houses on the other side of the fence. And yes, we peeped. It was so easy and there was no way to be caught that it perverts your morals. You would have to be a strong person to resist the temptation. This was in the 1990s. Mass surveillance destroys the dignity of both the people spied on and those doing the spying.
I'm usually someone that's very fond of privacy, but I'm not entirely sure I have any qualms with CCTV in public places and in fact I'd love to hear arguments against them.