> No. In Poland it's legal to record everything, only when you publish the recordings you need the recorded people to agree.

Interesting. Thanks for this perspective. But for the sake of this debate it's still more or less the same situation.

> The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy.

The government and everyone else who might have access to the data.

> Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management.

Hard disagree.

> Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?

No. Speed cameras are different. They do more or less not record people who are not reasonably suspected of committing the crime of speeding. They are more analogous to a doorbell camera (or car sentry system) that only actually starts storing/sharing/streaming data when very good evidence of a crime is in progress. I would, for example, be OK with a camera pointed at a public area if the operator of the camera can prove that the data is only stored whenever say the house's burglary alarm trips (this is equivalent to speed cameras when the induction loop in the ground says that a car passed faster than the speed limit). That minute of recording that may include innocent people in public areas is something I would consider to be in the public good. It's at least very different from a system that monitors continuously.

The fact that nothing is stored in normal circumstances of course needs to be backed up by very public audits. For example the operator would need to release source code and be liable to an enormous fine if state inspectors find that different code actually runs on the device. At least that seems like the ideal situation to me.

> Speed cameras are different.

So basically your entire argument revolves around the government pinky-promising that it won't use the data from speed cameras to track innocent citizens. Because when the network is dense enough, you can tell who went exactly when and where. This isn't any different from Amazon pinky-promising that it will only use data to improve customer experience.

The bigger point I'm making is that mass-surveilance technology does have benefits to the society, and any absolutist "but but but my privacy" who fails to acknowledge them is doomed to lose the debate.