I’m from the Netherlands, near Germany. Mass surveillance feels incredibly scary. And it comes with major risk if anyone with the wrong intentions ever gets to power. Like what happened in Germany last century, we don’t want that happening while everyone is being tracked.

If I try to do the threat modeling, I guess I’m seeing three levels:

1. Intelligence agencies. They probably have access to all possible data about you. Don’t make them your enemy. Hopefully they never turn evil in your country.
2. Large technology companies. They make the infrastructure like phone operating systems, stuff that you can’t get around on the modern internet like Cloudflare, etc. They can be affected a little bit with legislation like the GDPR but only to a matter of degrees. But at least they have reasonably good security so you don’t fully lose control of your data. The worst thing they will do to you is to try to convince you to buy stuff, which isn’t all that bad.
3. Smaller or non -tech companies that just are not competent enough to keep your data secure. They will use dependencies that spy on you, like Google Analytics or android app creation frameworks that inject location tracking. An online pharmacy that is using Facebook scripts and thus shares all your medical purchases with Facebook or elsewhere. A lot of this would be illegal but it is hard to find out and enforce the law about, and it’s like a whack a mole game. It’s hard to know where your data goes and it is probably being sold to whoever wants to pay. For example, local police buying location data from data brokers (worth double checking but I think this actually happens). Since there is no limit to who can access the data, this is more worrying. But for these things, you kind of have the big tech companies on your side. Browsers and phones tend to have built in tracker blocking these days. And you yourself can choose to be careful about what software you run from this category.

My point is that we should be clear about why we are concerned about the future. Who is the threat and how could they use your data against you? Breaking it down and pointing to a clear harm will help people around you understand why you are concerned.

Dangerous, as a Communist living in America.

It scares me how much power it gives the ruling class

Not a fan.

Don’t like it, can’t change a lot of it.

Some stuff I can replace with open source software, but a lot of stuff will always be proprietary and opaque. I kinda just have to deal with that.

smartphones were basically the nail in the coffin. Everything else it gravy.

My level of worry hasn’t lowered in years…

But honestly? Low on the totem pole. Even with Trumpy governments.

Things like engagement optimized social media warping people’s minds for profit, the internet outside of apps dying before our eyes, Sam Altman/OpenAI trying to squelch open source generative models so we’re dependent on their Earth burning plans, blatant, open collusion with the govt, everything turning into echo chambers… There are just too many disasters for me to even worry about the government spying on me.

If I lived in China or Russia, the story would be different. I know, I know. But even now, I’m confident I can given the U.S. president the middle finger in my country, but I’d really be more scared for my life in more authoritarian strongman regions.

Use FOSS on non-intel hardware and use tor. Your physical life is just gonna be kind of tracked because if you live in a walkable city, you’re on camera the whole time you’re out and modern cars phone home EVERYTHING if you don’t live in a walkable city. I guess you can buy a 1997 Honda Accord to get around that but on an infinite timeframe the cost of maintaining a pre-panopticon vehicle will only go up…

Snowden’s leaks are a big reason why I got into politics and FOSS and a big reason why I’m a socialist today.

I think it’s both horrible and inevitable.

First: Mass Surveillance is possible without computing technology. The Stasi secret police in the DDR or secret police of the Soviet Union and North Korea demonstrate this. Normal citizens where secret spies that reported their family members or “friends” activity. In your wording of your text I notice you are mostly concerned with computational surveillance with modern technology, why not expand this to other human based surveillance systems?

Now to the computing aspects: Standardization Whatever is possible with technology will be implemented by someone, even if it was meant as a temporary test it might become permanent apparatus for surveillance. A good example of that is the http protocol which through its faulty design allows some surveillance: cookies, user-Agent headers, IP-Addresses, Domain name systems. Someone in the surveilance agency of China understood http stack and its vulnerabilities, otherwise there would be no great chinese firewall that can block all foreign traffic 🏰🏯🏰.

No one wants to go away from http, eventhough it enables chinese mass surveillance, because it became a convenient standard. This is why it became permanent, even though more private systems are possible (onion/i2p sites), very few use them. Lazy Convenience > Privacy.

All communication will yield metadata.

Tldr:

Knowledge is power.

Human organizations: It is free real estate.

What do have to hide?

I kinda just accepted that it exists. Governments literally have hardware-level backdoors in most consumer computers (Intel ME, AMD PSP, etc). There isn’t really anything you can do about that if you don’t want to cut off yourself from society. I will still pick low-hanging fruit of course, but most of my “opsec” effort is focused on not giving corporations any data