How much privacy do we deserve to have?

I’ve been wrestling with this question this week. It's been weighing on me since seeing some of the reaction to the announcement by the Greater Sudbury Police Service that its automatic licence plate scanner pilot project was up and running.

As I expected it would, the scanner raised the hackles of many people. Comments on NorthernLife.ca, distilled to their essence, basically questioned if we could trust that police would only use the scanner to catch bad guys and not compile data from every plate caught by its electronic eye. It feels like an invasion of privacy.

That is a legitimate concern. But I think the strong response is more of a reaction to living in an increasingly monitored and surveilled society than it is to the licence plate scanner.

Concerns aside, the scanner is actually a good tool for the police service. It does the work of an army’s worth of officers. And with some 10,000 drivers motoring around the city with expired tags, suspended licences and the like, the scanner allows police to deal with that issue passively, while pursuing more pressing criminal concerns.

Unless you get into an accident with one of these wayward drivers, it may not seem like they have a direct impact on your life, but they do. They hit each of us in the pocketbook in a pretty big way — we pay for their shortcomings with higher insurance premiums.

If wider use of licence plate scanners lowers my insurance premiums, that's something I can get behind.

But there's still that nagging question about privacy, about our personal information and who has access to it, and under what circumstances. The scanner is just one of many new tools (and a relatively innocuous one at that) authorities have to peer into our private lives.

GSPS officials have been clear: They will not store the data of lawful drivers. But the fact is, we don’t know for certain. All we can do is trust the police are following the rules they said they would follow.

We have to live with a lot of trust nowadays, not just when it comes to the police. More and more, we are a monitored society and the means to monitor us are only getting more pervasive, more sophisticated and more invisible.

We walk around with cameras in our pockets. Surveillance cameras are nearly as common in and around private homes as they are in retail outlets and government buildings. Red light cameras regularly snap our photos.

Everything we do, upload and type onto the Internet is stored somewhere. We share fairly intimate details of our lives on social media every single day.

At any given moment of any given day, we are being monitored by someone, somewhere, somehow.

The Ashley Madison leak is a good example of that. Its members trusted their private information (names, credit card numbers, addresses, indiscretions) would be kept private. The company not only failed to do that, it lied by holding onto that information even after people had paid to have it dumped.

After 9/11, citizens of the western world told their governments they wanted to feel safe from terrorists. We didn’t specifiy how much safer we wanted to be — we trusted our MPs and MPPs to know how much safer is enough.

We said we were willing to give up some privacy in exchange for a feeling of security. Canada didn’t go as far as other countries did (I’m looking at you, U.S. of A), but we did allow our government to enact 10 new pieces of legislation to fight terrorism that erode personal privacy, and allow Canadians to be arrested without a warrant and detained without charges.

Many Canadians were aghast at the complexity and breadth of the domestic monitoring undertaken in the U.S. and revealed by Edward Snowden’s NSA leak. Aghast, yes, but not so aghast that many of us batted an eye when Stephen Harper’s government passed the newest anti-terrorism bill, C-51 — a full 14 years after 9/11.

I’m sure you’ve heard the “I’ve nothing to hide, so I’ve nothing to worry about”-argument from supporters of tougher terrorism laws. To me, that’s a false premise, because it doesn’t matter if you have something to hide, C-51 treats all of us equally — under the legislation, we’re all potential terrorists.

I don’t feel very good about that. It's Orwellian. I don’t know if you can call that security and I don’t know that that is the kind of Canada we want to have, a country where we have to watch what we say because someone, somewhere is watching and might take offence.

And I’m not saying local police officers are going to misuse the scanner. But the fact remains, it is one more piece of technology with a potential for abuse, abuse that can occur quietly, without us every knowing what has happened.

We have to trust authorities to follow the rules put in place to prevent such abuse; we don't have much of a choice, though: They have both the tools to do it and the legislation to back it up.

But as monitoring technology becomes more pervasive — whether tools the authorities use to fight crime and terrorism, or ones we carry around in our pockets — we have to stretch that trust increasingly further.

I don’t have any answers or solutions. But I am uneasy. I find myself wondering how much privacy is enough and how much have I already lost.

If we continue along this road without taking some time to reflect on what the destination might be, there will come a tipping point, a point where our trust is stretched so thin and the tools that monitor us become so ubiquitous, our trust won’t matter anymore — privacy will no longer be a right; it will just be a word.

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of NorthernLife.ca.