Technology

Yes, there's a balance that has to be struck between protection and liberty. Years ago I speculated what could happen if everyone was chipped into a system that monitored their vitals, with the resulting data we could track morbid outcomes (say heart attacks) to their core roots and then track people who are currently experiencing early warning signs and show the TRUE POWER OF PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE

The problem is, of course, so much data can be used for purposes against the interests of the public, and will once there are technicians privy to all that information. This was the original business model of Google: no-one looks at the data except its owner (e.g. I get to look at my own contacts lists) and Google profits from analysis of multiple data points. Only the police got the power of courts to look at the data, to the point where they wanted everyone who happened to websearch a given name, or whose phones were in a radius of a crime scene at a certain time.

You don't want to be a non-white or a known protestor who had business near a crime scene in the US.

So yeah, until we're able to lock up data so no-one but their intended audience has the capacity to read it, even when a court writes a warrant, we can't trust such all-encompassing systems, especially if the state is at risk of turning into an ideology-driven regime. (England, for instance, still has hard feelings between Catholics and Anglicans, and the Irish / UK border is a bit tense these days.)