When I speak with people I know who have returned from a visit to the UK, they all report, without fail, one thing that startled them to the core about Great Britain: the omnipresence of surveillance cameras. The Brits themselves have remained remarkably calm about the government’s excessive use of electronic surveillance; 45 percent even consented to surveillance in public toilets in one survey.

Occasionally, however there is an exception to the Brits’ apathy toward surveillance in which an individual gets publicly angry about being unjustifiably monitored. One of these individuals is Jenny Paton, a woman who was monitored through various mediums and wrongly suspected of falsifying her address. The details of Paton’s case, as discussed in the New York Times today, remind us of why we should care about our privacy to begin with.

Local officials in Paton’s town obtained her telephone billing records, covertly followed she and her children and maintained a log on their movements – all in the name of seeing whether or not she had lied about her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school. She hadn’t. And since it’s technically legal for local governments to secretly follow residents if they fail to recycle or have loudly barking dogs, those intercepting Paton’s records did nothing legally wrong.

But an infringement of privacy is not the only side effect of such a pervasive surveillance system. The Raw Story ran a story in 2007 revealing the ins and outs of Britain’s system and cited its enormous price tag as one of its most potent consequences. At the time of the story, the Home Office of the UK had spent more than three quarters of crime prevention money on what it’s dubbed “technology of record.”

What’s more is that the surveillance might be ineffective. Martin Gill, a criminology professor at the University of Leicester ran a study in 2005 and found that in 13 specific communities he analyzed, criminal activity actually increased with the implementation of surveillance.