Tuesday 10 September 2013

Guilty until proved innocent

Yesterday, in the pharmacy, a girl took some bottles of perfume and walked away without paying. This is nothing extraordinary, it happens almost everyday. We never see the shop lifter in action, we notice missing stock,  we watch the cctv footage, call the police and usually nothing happens because nobody knows who they are. So my colleague had a brilliant idea, to have a system to track the mobile phones of everybody that walks through the door!! This way if anyone takes anything we could get a list of  the mobile phones of all the people that went into our pharmacy at a certain time!!! Obviously this sent me into a BIG rant and all my colleagues now know for sure that I am weird and crazy. Everyone failed to see how wrong it would be to have honest people on a list of suspects just because they walked into our shop! And what about the privacy of our costumers?! There are so many things wrong with her idea!! ( I do believe that if she comes up with a device like that she will make a fortune)
This is what our society has come to, this is how much people care about freedom! We allow the most outrageous things in the name of security, mobile phone  trackers, surveillance cameras everywhere, all to make us feel safe. But are we safer? I have nothing to hide, I have never harmed anyone, I've never done anything wrong, but I would prefer to be allowed to pick my nose without being caught on camera. I am not a criminal, why am I being watched? For my safety? If someone tries to murder me on the street will a camera save me? Maybe someone can recognise the murderer and catch him but I will still be murdered!!!
I am Portuguese but I live in Ireland with my husband and daughters, it pisses me off that I cannot leave Portugal (on a plane) with my daughters without Marco or his written permission, signed in the presence of an official of some sort. They are protecting the children, I could be running away with them! Again I have to prove that my intentions are good!  But are children safer, because of this law? I doubt it.
This is so wrong, we are assuming that everybody is rotten!! And what worries me the most is that my daughters think that that's normal because " there's a lot of bad people out there and we don't know who they are, so if you're good, prove it" !!!!!!
What the hell happened to " innocent until proved guilty"?

No comments:

Post a Comment