If anything private sector driven surveillance can be creepier-- it's a total "wild west" without even the pretense of public oversight and virtually no regulation. Only the most insanely creepy things like capturing video from your house and using it for analytics might run afoul of the law, and even there you'd have to prove it and prove harm and it would likely be civil not criminal. The NSA and CIA at least technically answer to the public and are subject to regulations about what they can do with the data.

To quote Steve Rambam from HOPE: "If you're angry about what the NSA is doing, you should be furious about what Google and Facebook are doing."

IMHO the Amazon Echo and similar beyond-Orwellian devices will someday be looked back upon with the same amount of "what were they thinking?!!?!" as stuff like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

To continue with the nuclear analogy: I've been predicting a privacy/security "Chernobyl" event related to mobile and/or IoT for many years now. It'll be something like a corporate whistleblower revealing that a company has been running all ambient sound from all customers' houses through speech to text for over a year, then putting it all in a database and selling access more or less indiscriminately. Customers, it will come out, will include organized crime, foreign governments, etc., and some of the data will turn out to be from the homes of US Government Secret and Top Secret clearance employees, CXO level corporate personnel, police, etc. Only a matter of time. I'm counting the days.

If you give me a deadline and a list of companies, I am willing to bet money against this.

A list would be tough. I'd personally bet on a Chinese vendor or a perhaps yet to be born startup with explosive growth on a trendy home automation product.

I'd say by 2020 or so there will be a major well publicized leak or scandal from such a vendor.

It'd be hard to place a bet though, since it'd be hard to decide if/when a bet were actually won.

Before 1 January 2020. Company will be a recent entrant into the fortune 1000. By recent, I mean not in the Fortune 1000 as of 1 January 2010. $1 says it happens. If 100 people bet against me, I pay out 1 cent to each. If more than 100 bet against me and win, I pay a cent to first 100.

I'm not sure how other lines of betting work, but interested in proposals.

Thanks. That's too general for me. I would bet if you gave me a smaller list of companies (eg Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), and a more specific list of incidents.

And, of course, we would have to agree on odds. Eg, if you are really sure you could offer to pay me 5 USD if your prediction comes true, but I'd only have to pay 1 USD otherwise. (Or if I feel more sure, I could offer eg to pay 7 USD for every 4 USD you wager.)