I agree that I did sound defeatist a bit. My reasoning for that is I am directly working in an area where I'm literally watching the technology be employed, an

I agree that I did sound defeatist a bit. My reasoning for that is I am directly working in an area where I'm literally watching the technology be employed, and workarounds being created to "protect" privacy, for example, employing machine learning on a device to do image processing so the raw input data never leaves the device. However, the ultimate goal of this technology is to uniquely identify you for the sake of personalization, tracking, etc. There's an implicit grant being invoked that if anonymized properly or if certain measures are taken, then the privacy breach is ok. I'm reminded of some culture I heard of once that refused to have photographs taken of themselves out of fear that it would steal their souls. Any case where data is harvested via observations of you in which that data that represents you is not controlled by you or you are not aware of, seems like a breach of privacy. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm not defeatist, I believe we have the power to change things. But, I'm also saying, I'm not sure, for a variety of reasons, we'll ever be able to rollback the concept of pervasive survellaince because, it is starting to become part of technological advancement - for our technology to recognize and work with us better, it must observe us. So long as that is the case, that ability can be abused unless it is protected, and, as security experts like Bruce Schneier have said, there is no such thing as absolute security, only security that lasts for a certain period of time [1]. [1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2008/01/the_psychology_of_se.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2008/01/the_psychol...