[salawat]

>I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.

You should be worried about both, they're honestly equivalent.

See, this is the greatest bait and switch ever perpetrated on the citizens of the United States, and I'm not sure anyone was even actively trying to do it. Time was, communication between you and someone else was fundamentally expected to stay private. This was by definition prior to Third Party Doctrine, with which the Judiciary unilaterally decided the 4th Amendment was more of a suggestion than a hard line in the sand.

Communication intermediaried through a service provider should never have been severed from personal effects and papers. If third-party metadata were treated bbased on the end; intended communication either point to point (private), multicast (confidential with expectation of privacy), or broadcast (implicitly public), we'd be in a much better place. When the Government starts vendoring out surveillance, or bakes it into departments, you know you've steered your society off the rails somewhere.

The fact we're okay with businesses acting like a cabal of gossiping grannies only legitimizes the continued erosion of private space. How long until IoT connection strength logs make it possible to surveill anywhere with enough devices and computing power?