They think it won’t be used against them, until one day it does, and they are horrified when a divorce attorney is talking about the GPS movements from their “connected car” or their bank closes an account and locks out their funds because they attended a political protest. Unfortunately for them the realization comes way too late.
Not to mention those horrified at finding out that even though they deleted their tweets and videos, the feds have shown up at their doorstep because they were in a rampaging mob in the Capitol, searching for elected officials to murder.
I wish there was a nice, easy answer on where to draw the line with surveillance. I'm actually glad that the insurrectionists left a zillion-mile wide electronic trail, but I'm all too acutely aware that these capabilities can be turned against anyone, and I'm dead-set against backdooring encryption. At least (US-specific here) there are nominally limits on what the government can do, but those limits are often ignored, and private corporations have much freer rein on what they can do with your data.
Why else would they bring smartphones?
Part of liberty is cleaning up the mess when some people take it a bit far, and moving on.
Also, I have not seen evidence that its effects have been nullified with its expiration, but I'm willing to learn.
Speaking from my vantage in the United States, I can't believe how quickly the population has become knowingly accepting and complicit with a mass surveillance culture. I'm equally concerned with how quickly ownership of purchased goods has been undermined by the server-client model of the internet. These two things are linked and fundamentally disagree with the basic premises the US believes itself to be founded on ...
It's hard to draw parallels historically in a way that gives hope. There is quite a lot of middle ground and reasonable solutions that just don't get mentioned in the political theater of today's corpocracy.
I know all this has basically become a meme on HN, but every government not following the EU's example and iterating on things like GDPR is implicitly supporting authoritarianism (if not explicitly) and setting up an oppressive future that their children will be trodden down by.