> It is too easy to get accused of something. And you have no evidence to defend yourself. If you keep video recording of your surroundings forever, you now have evidence.

This assumes that you have access to those recordings. If you're live-logging your life via something you're wearing all day every day, maybe - but if the government decides to prosecute you for something, what are the odds that you'll be able to pull exonerating evidence out of the very system that's trying to fuck you?

Even if a system doesn't care, it's still a hassle. Case in point: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michigan-s...

> An African American man who was wrongly convicted of a fatal shooting in Michiganin 2011 is suing a car rental company for taking seven-years to turn over the receipt that proved his innocence, claiming that they treated him like “a poor black guy wasn’t worth their time”.

I found this article while looking for another story that's virtually identical; I believe in that one it was a gas station receipt that was the key in his case, and he ended up spending very minimal time in jail.

How many people are in jail now because they weren't able to pull this data?

i recently tried one of those cashierless amazon stores. it was an odd jolt, this feeling to be trusted, by default. It was vaguely reminiscent off one in my childhood, when, after my parents had sent me on an errand to the local grocer, I'd forgotten the money and the clerk/owner let me just walk out since they knew me. Presumably they and my mom would take care of the balance later.

I live now in a city where small exchanges are based on a default of of mistrust (e.g. locking up the tide-pods behind a glass case - it's not a meme). The only super market near (not even _in_) my food desert started random bag checks.

The modern police state requires surveillance technology, but abusive authority has flourished in any technological environment. the mafia had no problem to terrorize entire neighborhoods into omerta for example, without high technology. i'm sure there's other examples.

i don't know the right answer, but considering the extent to which anti-social and criminal attitudes are seemingly allowed to fester, while everybody else is expected to relinquish their dignity, essentially _anonymize_ themselves, it makes me less and less have a kneejerk response to the expansion of technologically supported individualization.

It'll may help, but the police will realistically not make an effort into proving your innocence. You'll have to dig that evidence up yourself.

Netflix has a documentary, Long Shot, on someone who was proven innocent of a murder as footage of them at a baseball game was found at the time of the murder. They had to get help finding that footage, as the police wouldn't check.

The prosecutors absolutely did not care that video footage, and phone evidence, placed him at another location, and continued to insist on his guilt. The judge eventually dismissed the charges.

Would you be happy for such systems to scale with income and power?

Surely those with larger means have a bigger impact if they're acting nefariously? And it'd be a HUGE issue for society if our rich and powerful were wrongly accused, and couldn't implement their efficiencies and expertise across the market.

who cares if you're tracked because you have nothing to hide, right?

now imagine you're the wrong religion after the regime change.

"I have nothing to hide" is a stupid argument that leads to concentration camps