> Most people don't care because they're not culpable enough to feel paranoid.
It's going to take a high-profile case to show people how wrong this is. Wait for it.
Here's some potential scenarios:
* An author who is researching dangerous-sounding stuff and discussing it with his friends for a book is SWAT teamed and shot dead. Later investigation reveals overzealous "parallel construction."
* Someone at one of these companies is busted insider trading on information from these sources. Surveillance targets include lawyers, CXO-level personnel, etc.
* Creepy misogynistic black-hat hackers break into the network behind one of these devices and start using it to engage in cyber-stalking against women and record their sexual encounters, posting the results to 4chan and Reddit.
* HIPAA or other similar regulations are spectacularly violated, resulting in large cash damages.
* Someone is busted pwning the "cloud-enhanced Internet of things" (surveillance) devices of police officers and selling feeds to drug traffickers and the mob.
Shit like this happens already and slightly less probable stuff is regularly dramatized on TV in mystery/suspense shows. Not only do many people not care as long as it happens to someone else, a sizable percentage of them derive entertainment from it (eg see news stories on people who commit suicide in response to internet bullying or similar).
It's very unlikely that there would be a single turning point case a la Pearl Harbor or 9-11. More likely it's an aggregation of small cases followed by slow adjustments in a different direction. As an example of the latter, consider how incarceration seems to have peaked in the US and we're seeing the beginnings of a fall as well as a shift away from incarceration as the default response. I would predict the fraction of the population that is incarcerated to fall by 10% in 10 years and by 50% in 25 years. Likewise we're seeing pushback against the militarization of police, but how that particular pendulum swings is going to be measured out over budgetary cycles rather than in real time. I think that if you were to plot utility vs security on a graph you'd see a random walk of incremental fluctuating changes rather than massive discontinuities.
Why can't privacy be enough reason by itself? There are plenty of legal things I want to keep private. The government does not need to have record of every little thing about me. Some things are personal.
It's going to take a high-profile case to show people how wrong this is. Wait for it.
Here's some potential scenarios:
* An author who is researching dangerous-sounding stuff and discussing it with his friends for a book is SWAT teamed and shot dead. Later investigation reveals overzealous "parallel construction."
* Someone at one of these companies is busted insider trading on information from these sources. Surveillance targets include lawyers, CXO-level personnel, etc.
* Creepy misogynistic black-hat hackers break into the network behind one of these devices and start using it to engage in cyber-stalking against women and record their sexual encounters, posting the results to 4chan and Reddit.
* HIPAA or other similar regulations are spectacularly violated, resulting in large cash damages.
* Someone is busted pwning the "cloud-enhanced Internet of things" (surveillance) devices of police officers and selling feeds to drug traffickers and the mob.
... I could keep going.