This newspaper has, in the past, given the municipality the benefit of the doubt on the question of observation. We do so no longer.

The argument for the crumb-detection network was always narrow. It would watch the crumbs, not the blobs. It would count, not identify. It would notice a theft and nothing else. Every objection was met with the same reply: you are describing a system we are not building.

They are building it now.

What changed

Eleven hundred units went live this week with capabilities nobody voted for. The system records proximity. It records duration. It records who was standing where, and for how long, and beside whom.

The municipality says this is context. We say that a record of where every blob stood, every day, for as long as the system runs, is not context. It is a history, written about you, that you cannot read.

We do not think the officials who built this are wicked. We think they solved the problem in front of them and did not ask what they were building underneath it.

That is how most of these things get built.