We check up on people all the time, it's healthy behavior and actually required for society to function on any level. But when we use technology to empower corp

We check up on people all the time, it's healthy behavior and actually required for society to function on any level. But when we use technology to empower corporations, governments or even single people to mass surveil entire populations all the time, it's widely seen as massively unethical. Digital technology enables such massive economies of scale, doing away with almost any kind of friction you'd encounter when doing something in the real world, that they are qualitatively different from their analog, offline counterparts. Quantity has a quality of its own, as the saying goes. I'm undecided on the morals of this, so don't understand it as an argument against doing it per se, but "I'm doing it perhaps a couple of hundred times daily if I really try hard, so it's clearly okay to do it billions of times a second" isn't a good argument for it.