> My main annoyance with surveillance in London is it wasn't good enough to catch the bastards

Well that’s the norm with all surveillance: it pretty much never helps you and might hurt you, regardless of the promises. Obviously after decades of constant spying, men are still getting ads intended for women and vice versa, and yet micro targeting is changing election outcomes. Banks and governments watch every single transaction, but it doesn’t reduce the administrative burden of compliance for tax paperwork. Airport experiences are worse than ever and at greater expense, but anyone with a few brain cells to rub together knows that it’s just security theater. Even more basically.. google reads all your email and searching for that exact phrase you know you read or wrote just a few weeks ago somehow turns up zero results.

This will all just get worse, because as the amount of data collected increases, everyone can be suspected of something just because of coincidence. Your insurance company is getting the memo about your poor diet or know that you’re driving too fast, and just won’t bother to find out about your healthy exercise regimen or that your job is driving an ambulance! To be presumed innocent you’ll need to opt into more data collection or disclosures of course, that’s the way it goes, but this only makes things worse because the extra data is just more stuff that can be used in a case against you.