I am reminded of the TV series "The Prisoner" out of BBC, especially the final episode "Fall Out Pt2".
Expounds about "the individual's right to be individual", community, the status quo, and so forth.
And over that "no" is a complete sentence that needs no more explanation.
A quote from that article: "There are numbers here, there are no names, so you can't expect it to end like James Bond, so you have to have an allegorical ending. Now (...) what is the most evil thing on earth? Is it jealousy? Is it hate? Is it revenge? Is it the bomb? What is it? When one really searches it's only one thing, it's the evil part of oneself that one is constantly fighting until the moment of our demise. The Jekyll and Hyde if you like, but on a much larger scale." —Patrick McGoohan. Which reminds me of Sad But True by Metallica.
Actual real privacy would be between two parties that trust each other and encrypt their communications in both directions. That means no Facebook servers to intercept your commentary, send you advertisements, and send friend suggestions.
I understand your point is that our loss of privacy didn’t lead to arrests or in these instances, but there has almost certainly been arrests in other instances, and we’d be losing sight of the bigger picture if we deluded ourselves into believing oppressive governments, companies, billionaires, etc.. weren’t already heavily using mined data to counter dissidence movements in more ways than just arrests.
It is remarkably difficult for such a thing to happen. Very little is needed and that that is tends to be rather obvious.
There is no commercial incentive to do any of that
As companies share more information with governments, they are able to learn more and more about their citizens. Take Facebook, a company that Laura Poitras described as 'a gift to intelligence agencies'[1]. Facebook allows governments to arrest people planning to participate in protests before they have even begun. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Our privacy is eroding. As a society, we are beginning to accept this lack of privacy as normal: and this is extremely dangerous. Privacy provides a place for us to be ourselves, to express ourselves in new ways without fear of being watched by preying eyes. If we lose privacy then we lose this ability to experiment, and, more importantly, we lose our power.
[0]https://aeon.co/essays/privacy-matters-because-it-empowers-u...
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/10/23...