Small "crimes" like stealing streetcar fare are sought out not because of the crime itself but because the more contact points people have with police the more people are arrested. There is probably an overlap of people who steal streetcar fare and people who are harboring small amounts of narcotics etc etc.
Just like in America we're pulled over on the road for the most benign things just so there's contact with the police, which leads to a higher rate of convictions.
I was doing self-checkout at Walmart and the dumb machine thought I stole something I had already scanned, lo and behold an officer appears out of the shadows with a general attitude at me as if I was trying to pull off the grand-heist of stealing GREEN ONIONS.
I personally think law-abiding people have a right to limited contact with police.
I've been driving for almost 15 years in the UK, and I've only been stopped once by the Police at a heavily advertised drink-driving checkpost set up during the Christmas season.
Discrimination does happen in the UK, but I don't think there's the same motivation from the Police to arrest people for trivial matters during this sort of campaign.
Certain systems are more efficient if they operate with high trust. The TTC is one of the places where we go with the more efficient option that allows defectors to gain at the cost of others. I actually know someone that is a communist and refuses to pay TTC fare on the basis that he thinks it should be completely socialized. He estimated that the one time he got a ticket paid for only 1/3rd or 1/5th of his total usage.
In other words, defectors are still net-ahead. The system is under-policed.
But the small amount of policing that exists exerts enough social pressure to stop widespread flouting of the rules. I was happy to provide proof that my very-soon-to-be-expiring transfer was from a valid trip.
I'm sorry that you've had a poor interaction with an officer, but I think it's partially a matter of how one treats officers. Even when I've been in the wrong, I did my best to treat them with respect and I quite honestly have been treated well by every police I've dealt with, save one exception when I was pulled over in America. I accept that this happens, and a curt reply and a stiff ticket is not the end of the world and I am happy to have largely lived and traveled in places where the police were civil.
Thank you to the other commenter for pointing out the banality of the "crime".
I am far less likely to initiate a serious crime in Canada than I am to be falsely accused of a serious crime. It is hard to fake exhaust data and saying "I saw him near the John St Starbucks at 9am with a gun" is fakeable just by following someone around. You don't need my Google data to prove it. It's on the CCTV cameras, it's on the cellphone towers my phone is pinging, etc.
I understand this makes people nervous, and I agree that there is something to be nervous about, but when I talk about the practical choice of recording your location data to a provider like Google I don't see much practical downside at the present time.
And that argument is much, much older than the digital age. If anything, extra tracking helps exonerate more than without it (false imprisonment, etc) https://time.com/wrongly-convicted/
The reality is that data can be used to your benefit or against you. Having more of it doesn't shift the balance one way or another. It just means there's more opportunities to take it one way or the other.
Your times article also makes no mention of location tracking raising exoneration rates. It talks most prominently about how cheap faulty field drug tests contributed significantly to the improper convictions.
When you are facing wrongful conviction, the assumption is that you are unable to present evidence in an effective manner anyway.
I'm also assuming here that you are actively looking to have your location logged -- something most people do not explicitly sign up for before it starts happening for them (usually after it has manifested results, people accept it as some weird fact-of-life).
headline: "Google tracked his bike ride past a burglarized home. That made him a suspect."
HN discussion about it (March 7, 2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511637
Nobody could cheat secretly. They'd still cheat. The framing story in my favourite comic issue "Winter's Tale" has more or less exactly this be scenario, "I was going to tell you" he says. The people in Winter's Tale and most of that run (Gaiman's Golden Age of Miracleman) live in a utopia, but they're still people and they still cheat and lie. The larger point of the story is that children won't fill a hole in your heart.
Your last point is exactly poignant; it'll be lawmakers who end up above the law, above the control. Which makes it more like 1984 than a "borg" utopia.
The solution shouldn't be to make crimes easier to hide. It's to legalize homosexuality.
Indeed, I believe the first use of the "Right to Privacy" was by a lawyer and Louis Brandeis, and future Supreme Court Justice, upset that a journalist had written that one of them attended a wedding.
Depending on who brings to suit, I expect it's likely that even the conservative justices will suddenly agree with a right to privacy.
Then one day the Toronto Transit Commission police thought I was re-using someone elses streetcar fare because of how old it was. I just prefer the streetcar to subways, so I took a longer route. As soon as I pulled out my phone with my location tracking they believed me. I didn't even have to resort to mentioning that I used to work for the TTC as a coop student.
I'm not saying I absolutely love all this surveillance-lite stuff, but in an honest breakdown of the tradeoffs for law abiding people living in real democracies or other trustworthy states I fail to see a huge downside at the present time.