It's not an overreaction. The idea of everyone willingly sharing the details of their every movement with sociopathic corporations who are beholden to national security letters would have been met with ridicule 30 years ago.
It's met with ridicule now, but the value of ridicule has slumped in
30 years.
Ian Levy, when he was at NCSC spoke about "shame as a weapon against
Big Tech". But he missed a crucial flaw - they do not give a fuck.
Shame and ridicule only work in societies where people have dignity,
self-respect, mutuality and care.
It's true that nobody has any reasonable expectation of privacy when
using a Google smartphone. But the ruling talks about "willingly".
What does "will" have to do with modern life where people are badgered
incessantly to surrender their choice, boundaries, and dignity?
To exercise "will" these days, is quite a big deal, and usually means
going against the flow and suffering some loss.
Shame is far more often used as a weapon promoting Big Tech. I am constantly ridiculed for not having Facebook or Whatsapp accounts, and many people that I meet are suspicious of me. Try meeting women on Tinder without Whatsapp.
I get enough matches and interesting conversations. It's moving that conversation to a different medium that is problematic when they want to see "who you are" first and you have no Facebook to show them, and even not Whatsapp to write to them.
For what it's worth, mentioning Telegram is even worse because that application is associated with drugs in our country.
I don't think that actual history supports that assertion. 30 years ago, cellular networks were really taking off and people were starting to use mobile phones en masse. Always on, pinging the base stations, delivering that data to equally sociopathic and beholden carriers. The public was not up in arms.
What's changed in the meantime, aside from the richness and granularity of location data, is awareness of the potential for the abuse of it all, supported by well-publicized incidents. Which is a good thing; the public is quite tolerant of invisible machinations, as long as they remain distant and abstract.
Nowadays with a raspberry pi and a 128gb SD card you can go to town on "all location data for the last year for all American cell phones".
Back in 1994, even coordinating reliable central writes of all that location data would have been extraordinarily complicated, and there was not yet a panopticon appetite that would attempt the endeavor without a heavily funded psychopath behind it.
As "we the industry" have gotten more capable (and comfortable) processing huge quantities of data (eg: post map-reduce), and the hardware requirements have fallen to "my cell phone could compute it in an hour", the risk has increased tremendously.
Same story with muskets, cannons and tanks vs AK-47's. "Gun Control" in the musket era is materially different than an era of AK-47's and drones. Same with data processing.
