Which do you think is more important? Needing to present an alibi in the case of you being wrongly accused? Or needing to conceal your actions in a world where something new has been made illegal?
The entire millenium-old body of law surrounding what rights you have when dealing with the police exists in order to protect the innocent, not the guilty.
Things like warrants don't exist to make it impossible for the police to do their work. They exist to make it so that they spend less[1] time harassing people who have done nothing wrong. It's difficult to frame the police scooping up data that a third party has on you as harassment.
[1] But not no.
What if I made something that you like to do illegal? Now you are a criminal concealing their crimes. Now your tech works against you and you must comply.
I absolutely agree with erring on the side of letting criminals get away with more if it means preserving privacy. No alibi safety net is worth trading away your privacy.
Pointless red herring. For any law, we can find someone that doesn't like it. Building an argument about police powers from that is building on quicksand.
Unless you mean to do away with law, and the concept of crime in general.
I noticed you didn't address my point around erring on the side of not infringing on privacy however. Does this mean that you agree?
That's not a valid argument. You don't get to pick and choose law. You either get the whole package, or nothing.
Police powers are completely orthogonal to this question.
The reason they are restricted by law is not so that law is more difficult to enforce. The barristers that have drafted all this precedent over the centuries did not do so with the goal of 'Man, wouldn't it be great if we made a copper's job difficult!"
The reason police powers are restricted by law is, as said earlier, to reduce the impact on how much police work should harass the innocent. The law doesn't recognize that there are parts of it that are arbitrary and optional. It either applies in its entirely, or doesn't.
As long as you focus on the harm to the criminal, you're framing your argument in an odd way. You're much better off building your argument in a way that focuses on harm to the innocent.
> I noticed you didn't address my point around erring on the side of not infringing on privacy however. Does this mean that you agree?
I didn't address it, because your argument lacks qualification, which makes it possible to take it to absurd conclusions.
If you believe privacy is an absolute good that cannot be infringed in any situation, then you get absurdity, like the police being unable to search an apartment that the neighbors have reported hearing gunshots from. (Because, heaven forbid, the occupants thereof may not be actually guilty of any crimes.)
If you don't believe that, then you're going to have to quantify your argument, with a basis for when you believe it is appropriate for the police to infringe on someone's privacy. You're then going to have to explain how its consistent with actual pre-digital legal precedent. You're then going to have to explain how your scaffolding leads to an outcome inconsistent with how policing is currently done in the digital world.
You've got a lot more work to do to make a coherent argument then simply saying "I believe privacy trumps solving crime," before I can respond to it.
No. I'm arguing that because laws can be arbitrary, we should err on the side of protecting criminals when difficult decisions around privacy are at play. I don't know why you insist on strawmanning absurd forms of what I am saying.
I'm probably 'strawmanning' it because your argument is utterly incomprehensible, given that it is entirely inconsistent with the purpose of the law.
The purpose of the law is not to protect the guilty from the legal consequences of things that they have done. You seem to think that it should be. This is utterly baffling. If you don't want people held accountable for crime, then strike those crimes from the criminal codex.
The number of guilty people that get off by it would be irrelevant compared to the number of innocents that become stigmatized by their peers.
Put it this way, if you had cameras watching you every moment of your life, you could have the perfect alibi for anything. But you would never be able to do anything considered illegal again, for whatever definition of "illegal."