There is a trending article on many platforms discussing "One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days".

Whilst we are against mass surveillance per se and we sympathise with this Lady for her traumatic and unjust treatment, in our minds, this article is a clear indication of the true issue surrounding any surveillance including cameras, Cookies, scripts and "pixel tracking" systems. Many of these tracking systems are the starting point. It is where data is collected for something to make a decision resulting in some form of action. That action may be simple and harmless, like the selection of an advert to place on the website you are visiting, But it may be much more serious. It may be the decision to accept you for a mortgage, or to calculate the price of your car insurance, It may even be a decision to include / exclude you from medical treatment. In this Lady's case, it was a decision to wrongly imprison her and steal 13 days of her life.

The truth is, we don't know what use surveillance data is put to, how accurate it is or if anyone oversees its use.

There are a number of issues at stake with mass surveillance and computer processing of any kind:

Attention Drift

Monitoring systems becomes passive; errors slip through because nobody's truly engaged. This isn't always people being lazy, we all need stimulus to operate at our best. When all stimulus is removed, our productivity and ability suffers.

Skill Atrophy

People lose the ability to do the tasks themselves as well as to diagnose, fix, or verify outputs. This leads to errors in the system being unnoticed and not corrected. In additon, we become helpless when the system falters or fails.

Automation Bias

We tend to trust automated systems even when evidence suggests otherwise. Critical thinking degrades resulting in, amongst other things, Innocent Women going to jail.

Volume Mismatch

Automated computer systems can work much faster than people. Where a system is implemented to speed up processing or reduce backlogs, care needs to be taken that the Humans involved in overseeing or checking the output can reasonably be expected to keep up. Where the workload pressures are too great Mistakes will, inevitably, slip through

Conflict of Interests

Ths data collectors (The likes of facebook, Google and other BigTech) have no interest in the quality of the data or the results of it's use. Their only concern is the profitablility of selling that data to whoever wants to buy it for whatever reason they want.

Lack of Accountability

The systems frequently create a position where no single part of the process has, or accepts, control. Everyone involved can ignore mistakes stating someone else will, or should, put them right.

Loss of Oversight

Many of these systems involve multiple layers or handlers. Few people will have (or want) a total overview. Working in silos can result in failures to control or secure data

All these possible problems need to be managed but private industry has no incentive to do so. This management takes resources, time and money that companies would rather spend increasing their profits, even if that's at the expense of other people's rights..

With the use of AI on the increase these problems are only going to get worse. The speed, volume and complexity of the decisions being made is growing at an exponential rate. The controls need to grow too. Legal measures need to enforce adequate safety controls. The governments that we elect need to bring in laws and regulations that protect the public from data misuse and commercial decisions that put profit over peoiple's wellbeing. Not only should the laws be brought in but resources should be put in place to monitor them. Governments cannot use the excuse that it costs too much!. The laws the Governments bring in should allow the setting of fines that cover the cost of any enforcement necessary.

Alphabet's 2025 Annual results showed a revenue of over $400 Billion (with a profit of over $34 billion). Facebook reported profits of over $60 Billion. When these companies are fined $400 Million, it has NO EFFECT. That $400 million comes out of their costs (before tax) not their profits (after tax), so a large percentage of it is paid by the taxpayer. These fines equate to about 0.5% of the companies Profits.

This is the equivalent of paying an employee £1,000 per week and fining them £5 when they steal all your commerciallly sensitive secrets.

Governments need to bring more control to BigTech and other privacy violating companies before we all end up in prison for a crime that we obviously didn't commit.