[eue6e6ey]

I'm not sure it makes sense to suggest people who work with data are normally the other way around. People who work with data and their activists are why regular Americans are at all scared of government digital surveillance. On the other side of that, people who don't work with data use free digital services everyday and so even if they know those products are built with their data they are more likely to be sympathetic because in their minds it's a fair trade for the utility they've gained and even the trades they didn't make still serve as evidence to them of how useful doing things this way is. An interesting experiment would be if a single city went all-in on digital surveilance and monetization so that the country could see clearly what was being gained and lost for the participants.

[some_random]

I cannot push back against the idea that ordinary people consent to collection when they use free services enough. This is an utterly transparent myth that data collectors, aggregators, and consumers tell themselves and others to justify their actions.

People do not understand what is being collected. I and probably everyone here has heard speculation that phones are constantly monitoring for keywords which are used in ads. It's an incredibly common idea that (afaik) isn't true, but shows just how little people understand how data collection works and again, what is actually being collected.

People do not understand how this data is used. The best example I can think of is with pregnant women. Every ad on every platform suddenly revolving around pregnancy and caring for a newborn is not the expected outcome of just googling for some mayoclinic articles. And of course if they're trying to conceal their pregnancy or worse, have a miscarriage, this has resulted in real world harm.

Finally, people cannot possibly consent to how this data will be used in the future. This should be pretty self explanatory.

Those who work for organizations that sell data or information gained from data such as Google or Facebook have to convince themselves the above is not true. In which case, it makes complete sense to insist that the US military needs to have a warrant in order to collect, since obviously a warrant is needed if the target for collection doesn't consent.

[eue6e6ey]

Just because people don't understand all the technical details doesn't mean they are sufficiently ignorant to cash in on power words like consent. While I realize it's shortsighted reasoning, it's incredibly common to hear some variant of "x already knows everything about me so who cares" or "my stuff's already in the cloud, I bet x could get to it if it mattered". People in the mainstream are /already/ assuming the worst case scenario, they just don't care as much as we think they should and the only reason the Europeans do is because they're not the ones running the services so the power balance is different.