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The vein here is that the most unremarkable people seem to believe that far-away powers that be care about looking at their private data because they're such a threat to the state because they're so edgy and subversive when the truth is the powers that be just don't care about them. Probably not even in the aggregate.
The powers that be seem intent on making examples of very average people these days. We've seen extreme prosecution of actions that "reasonable people" would believe would not draw nearly that much individual attention from the government (trucker protest in Canada, J6). And the other side is worried about the idea that, for instance, a right-wing government could use private collected information to identify and deport immigrants. "If you haven't done anything wrong (or big) you have nothing to fear" is not convincing to anyone.
If anything, a number of privacy advocates are attacking the problem from an abortion rights angle, from what I've seen, so there's already a good amount of left-coded concern.
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It was very predictable that the governments involved would be highly interested in going after the people involved in these two things, though.
Seeing that over a summer it was free game to take over neighborhoods, torch police stations, do nightly assaults on federal courtrooms, attempting to blind police officers, and in the previous years interrupt official proceedings (supreme court nominations), some people could have been given a wrong impression, yes. Not so much that the government wouldn't be interested in it, but that the judiciary branch would be so captured as to do what looks at least to one side like enforcing laws on blatantly political lines.
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Maybe after the fact. But prior, I'm sure a lot of people still clung to the belief that we lived in a free country.
Yes, nobody thought that the trucking protest was going to work, but anyone who expected that a ‘stop the steal’ rally busting into Capitol Hill during the electoral count would be treated proportionately had not been paying attention.
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These are average people in extremely man-bites-dog circumstances though. Contra-evidence: ~2 billion lifelong users of Google and Apple have uneventful things to report.
True, but more than ever we're at an inflection point nowadays where the ability to process this information and abuse it meets a distrust of its handlers. It's barely been one year where the public has seen the ability for computers to read and seemingly really "understand" human speech and its intents. All that collected data that we thought was too much to be processed, it could now be fed to NLP algos and to LLMs to read through and flag, on all sorts of criteria. Take a small fast LLM like Phi-2, tell it to read all personal conversations on Facebook Messenger or whatnot, flag all those that seem to indicate political extremism (as defined by politicians the public distrusts), forward them to a smarter LLM (GPT-4) to review, if it agrees, forward to a human for further review.
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