I am specifically worried about the extensiveness of the surveillance and control estate globally should western liberal values lose influence and autocratic control is grandfathered access to these tools of mass oppression. I think the discussion of the present can digress into relevant but distracting political debate, but it’s impossible to assert regardless of your political bent that these tools could be extraordinarily harmful in the hands of some future society.

I don’t see a way out honestly. The tools are too useful and too compelling. Any work done now on differential privacy, E2E, FHE, and other technologies can be easily reverted in a way that’s entirely transparent given the UX people expect. I feel that the rigorous maintenance of rights and freedoms as seen from a western liberal perspective is a very high energy state, and nature and human societies settle into lower energy states intrinsically.