Stringent supporters of privacy will tell you it has no ill effects, and any policies obstructing it aren’t preventing illegal activity, including child pornography. Maybe they feel like they just have to say this, as it’s the most-effective thing to say, but it seems fairly obviously to be untrue, and I would argue counter-productive. I’m confident whatever government (French or otherwise) cares more about knowing and controlling everything than they do about preventing crime, but to say it couldn’t or wouldn’t prevent crime I can only interpret as a bad faith argument. So bad faith on both sides, as per usual.
Personally, I just think the good outweighs the bad. We just can’t expect literally everyone to forfeit any sense of privacy because some criminals are going to use it to commit crimes. That’s a super dangerous precedent. You’re just going to have to find other ways to track them down, or accept that crime as a casualty of privacy and freedom.
Stringent supporters of privacy will tell you it has no ill effects, and any policies obstructing it aren’t preventing illegal activity, including child pornography. Maybe they feel like they just have to say this, as it’s the most-effective thing to say, but it seems fairly obviously to be untrue, and I would argue counter-productive. I’m confident whatever government (French or otherwise) cares more about knowing and controlling everything than they do about preventing crime, but to say it couldn’t or wouldn’t prevent crime I can only interpret as a bad faith argument. So bad faith on both sides, as per usual.
Personally, I just think the good outweighs the bad. We just can’t expect literally everyone to forfeit any sense of privacy because some criminals are going to use it to commit crimes. That’s a super dangerous precedent. You’re just going to have to find other ways to track them down, or accept that crime as a casualty of privacy and freedom.