Total surveillance doesn't have to be a bad thing, if it can only be accessed through a court order in order to be used for solving a crime or as evidence in court.
However, I can only see this happening in very developed and transparent democracies. Otherwise it is most likely gonna be abused in every way it can.
Serbia already leans towards being a police state, at least in comparison to other European states, so that would just make the situation there worse.
Once you build nuclear weapons, then you have to maintain them, and hope the required budget will remain in the future, and that corruption will not disrupt the processes involved.
Once you create repositories collecting data on third parties, you similarly will have to ensure that they will be protected against leaks - that the state may keep track just to be sure does not mean you would ever accept to live in glass walls.
Responsibility wise, if you gave a credit card number to a vendor, you trusted his security measures against leaking, but how about data that was copied without your consent? Who has access, how is it protected, who is responsible?
Even trusted governments can't guarantee that bad actors cannot access the data captured by the surveillance system.
If a government need total surveillance, it is because the government don't trust its people, which is because the people does not trust the government.
This cannot fix trust issues with surveillance, you must solve this with more/better democracy, not police.
There's a big mobster war going on in Serbia (and region) right now, and almost all of the dozens of recent big murder cases were at least partially solved thanks to surveillance cameras, phone tapping and cell towers logs. So surveillance when used for good can be extremely useful tool for justice and increase the safety of the public.
It's the same mentality as with the nuclear plants paranoia. Yes they can be dangerous if protocols fail, and yes that makes them a liability and requires constant care - but it's not a reason to completely ban a technology which also can give so many benefits to the society.
There's a huge difference between deploying cameras in public places so that u can go back and look at the records if something happens, and deploying cameras across the whole city that do real-time biometric identification on a mass scale. Its scary and heart-breaking, and no amount of protocol will make the tech safe from corruption. Frankly anyone that actually believes that these systems wont be abused is delusional at best.
> There's a huge difference between deploying cameras in public places so that u can go back and look at the records if something happens,
Wait a sec, I agree with you, but that's not what the parent comment claims. It says "surveillance is a bad thing period" and that's just not true, some forms of surveillance in some places can both help police and make people feel safer. Would anyone in their right mind rather park their new car in some dark alley, than under the eye of cctv camera? Of course not... so parent commenter made a huge bad generalization and that's the part I was commenting on.
Chemical factory in the middle of heavily populated area doesn't have to be a bad thing, if it is properly managed and safety systems are operating perfectly.
However, I can only see this happening in very developed and transparent democracies. Otherwise it is most likely gonna be abused in every way it can.
Serbia already leans towards being a police state, at least in comparison to other European states, so that would just make the situation there worse.