Very unconvinced it's lead to an explosion is child abuse.

Child abuse has always been happening (several of the older members of my family were abused), it just wasn't broadcasted. Even today I bet 99% of child abuse is never caught on camera. The increase from child porn is probably negligible.

If you actually read the article above, you can see that there's actually now lots of new evidence that viewing child porn makes people more likely to commit abuse, and that it seems to be a causal relationship, not a "marijuana is a gateway drug" relationship.

I couldn't find that in the article and would be immensely skeptical of such a claim (how on earth would you establish causation as opposed to common cause?).

Neither of those two things are facts. One is an opinion, and the other is speculation.

When did GP specify he was talking about facts?

I edited my comment from "facts" to "things," which was actually what I meant. Apologies. I'll clarify, so as not to disparage the person who replied.

Great points. It definitely seems to me that those two are fundamentally opposites. Suppose we champion (1), then with perfect privacy gives a lot of leeway for criminals to commit crimes such as those you stated and more without being able to detect that they did them.

However, without perfect privacy, every world citizen would be subjected to such monitoring, and we'll basically be exactly what 1984 is, with the metaphorical "telescreen" functionality spread across pretty much every device that's connected to a network.

They’re not complete opposites, since criminals don’t always have perfect privacy: they leave other evidence that can be discovered with a warrant. On the flip side, mass surveillance will just create selective enforcement.