* Scene opens with two federal agents discussing a new case *

Agent 1: There was a shooting on 5th st.

Agent 2: Just use the phone records to look up everyone in the area and then arrest them at their work in front of their boss.

Agent 1: It's ok to do this because the innocent will surely have a way to prove their innocence.

Agent 2: But what if it looks bad that we are arresting so many innocent people?

Agent 1: In every legal system there are always more crimes than can be prosecuted. The discretion of prosecutors is an important legal function. If we arrest someone embarrassing, we'll just find something to charge them with.

Agent 2: Yeah and contact with federal agents also _generates_ more crime, like lying to one of us is a felony, right?

Agent 1: Hope they have the $250k it takes to defend against a federal felony.

* The agents laugh *

* Scene end

> If we arrest someone embarrassing, we'll just find something to charge them with.

Or as they currently do: lie about their detainees doing crimes and/or plant contraband

In this situation, the privacy violation of becoming a suspect via location history is an utterly negligible problem. What you describe could just as easily happen in a traffic stop (and in fact probably far more likely).

> could just as easily happen in a traffic stop

Well it clearly does....

But I think the point being made is that part of the issue is lazy policing/detective work. The concern about privacy is really about the concern of __abuse__ of data. Why many of us want to protect our data is that we do not trust those in power, nor current nor potential future rulers (a big concern). Such instances as the above example are abuse of that data, as well as abuse of power. The thought is that if they are going to abuse us, we're going to make it more difficult. Dragnet operations make the above easier, not the same level of difficulty.

Bad cops are going to be bad cops regardless of the tools you give them. That isn't to say privacy is not a problem, just that I don't think privacy is the primary problem in your example.

Give a bad cop a club and they'll beat someone.

Give a bad cop a gun and they'll shoot someone.

Give a bad cop a swat van and they'll raid a teenager's home, kill their dog and brother.

I'm tired of this binary perspective. It is common but in bad faith. The tools matter. Different tools enable different levels of abuse. Yes, cops shouldn't abuse citizens and we should do our best to stop that. But do you expect to find a perfect solution? If not, then we should also ensure that when a bad cop slips through, they are limited in the damage they can do.

You are reading way too much into my comment. I was directly speaking to the example given and not making some universal endorsement of empowering cops.

There was nothing in that example that was specifically linked to data collection. You could have had the exact same situation except they are rounding up Black people as suspects. The problem there is bad cops not dangerous tools. The tool is irrelevant in the example.

Let me introduce you to this story:

https://nypost.com/2017/09/23/how-curb-your-enthusiasm-saved...

Nevermind that it had a good end. Recognize that even though there was reasonable doubt as a near impossibility of this man being guilty, the prosecutor still desperately tried to throw him in prison, despite him obviously being the wrong person and the prosecutor almost succeeded!

An amazing reason to never, ever, believe or trust policemen or prosecutors if you're ever on a jury

> But that wasn’t enough for the LAPD and the prosecutor — who had never lost a case and was going to push for the death penalty for Puebla’s murderer.

He did get some compensation:

> In 2007, Juan received $320,000 in a settlement of his civil lawsuit against the LAPD and the city of Los Angeles for false imprisonment, misconduct and defamation. (In 2008, gang member Raul Robledo received a life term for the murder.

But it's outrageous we, the taxpayers, have to pay for police misconduct. Let it come out of their pension fund (and reduce their pensions accordingly).

> If someone wants to home in and destroy you, they've always been able to do that without total surveillance.

This isn't even about that. Yes, if someone powerful wants to make your life hard, your life is going to be hard.

Now consider what happens if they just don't care whether you live or die. Some system is set up to "solve crimes" as "efficiently" as possible. The same sort of system that gets used to issue YouTube copyright strikes against the original creators or public domain works because Hollywood put a copy in a motion picture, or mark every email sent by a perfectly legitimate small private email server as spam.

The police increase their "solve rate" dramatically -- by putting a ton of innocent people in prison. Because now instead of unsolved crimes they have "evidence" which, even if it's all circumstantial garbage, is enough to coerce guilty pleas out of defendants who can't afford a good lawyer or don't want to risk having the penalty quintupled if they demand their day in court and lose, or would rather spend six months in prison than pay six years worth of wages to a lawyer.

> If the records exist, and you're not guilty of the crime, hope exists that you could be cleared.

Only you can't get access to the records, because they're sensitive for all sorts of reasons, e.g. because having them in the aggregate would allow you to locate people in witness protection or unmask undercover law enforcement or case targets for espionage or theft. So you can't give access to everything to everybody, which means it only gets used as evidence for the prosecution because they can get it and you can't.

> Doesn't it make more sense for one's worst fear to be accused of something for which you are innocent but have no alibi?

In principle they still have to prove your guilt even if you don't have an alibi. Think about it, a large proportion of crimes are committed at night when most people are at home asleep.

Meanwhile, data under your control is generally only useful as evidence of guilt, because otherwise they just argue that it was under your control. If your phone was at the location of the crime, they argue you were there. If your phone was at home 200 miles from the location of the crime, they argue you knew you were about to commit a crime and left your phone at home. It's used to hurt you but not to help you.

You're right, but then you have the problem of credibility. If Google's records are credible for this, then what's the chance that somebody will notice if some of those records are manufactured? It's like forging signatures - it's a problem because we trust signatures to some extent.

Police can and have forged evidence without having to resort to forcing a company to do so. The latter is more risky as there is a greater likelihood of a leak.

I don't exactly disagree in one sense, but this argument seems like it kind of generalizes to the idea that "better is worse", which I can't agree to.

The more technical details of recordkeeping or surveillance that there are, the more likely a frame-up will have flaws that people notice.

I don’t think the argument generalises quite that far, but it does go as far as “more information is worse.” The presumption of innocence is a valuable principle to which this applies. We ignore evidence that suggests that someone is guilty of a crime until the court process has finished, and if they’re “probably guilty” we say they’re actually “not guilty” for fairness reasons.

Data leads to control (in the extreme case, the government knowing all your thoughts can pretty much control your life). Sometimes this control is warranted, like using anonymized data to prevent crimes, with a panel of independent citizens auditing the access to make sure it is benefiting the society at large as opposed to a minority. But sometimes it can be used nefariously. For example the state can push propaganda based on the private data of the citizens, making the government less democratic over time to promote the agenda of a minority. My position is we don’t trust that use is legitimate, and don’t assume that states access to private data is in the benefit of the citizens. The government is always assumed guilty until proven innocent.

> If the records exist, and you're not guilty of the crime, hope exists that you could be cleared.

But if no records exist, you will not be a suspect in the first place.

Not really. Stone was already a suspect, this was a fishing expedition to confirm their suspicions.