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We're looking at more of an intuitive statistical gap in understanding small percentage chances. There is clearly a greater chance that if my private information is stored at police headquarters that some sequence of events will lead to someone at police headquarters using that information against me in some way, than if that information is not stored at police headquarters. Most people aren't capable of actually calculating the expected value of that probability, so they either round it up too high or too low.
Most people don't have the information to even estimate. If your GPS location pattern marks you as being high risk for being a drug courier and you keep getting pulled over for minor and imagined traffic violations as a result, how would you even know that's what's resulting in the harassment?
It's worse. I have to estimate it long before anything goes wrong.
And my modal case is something like coming into contact with a person of interest. Or it's personal, your former coworker with an axe to grind or your ex boyfriend or your new girlfriend's ex boyfriend with a grudge, happens to have access to that kind of thing in some way or another.
That probability is impossible to estimate in advance. When I went skeet shooting in 2017, I could not have known that multiple people I shot with would be indicted in federal court on "insurrection" charges. I've seen friends stalk romantic partners, perspective and current and former, all across the internet including misusing work tools to do so. I have no method of assessing the people I interact with for whether they materially increase that risk.
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