Most people are fine w/ the deal corporations like Alphabet & Meta have made w/ them. They are perfectly happy to trade their privacy for convenient access to "information" held on their servers & data centers. I don't think AI makes much difference here b/c if we can trust the numbers from OpenAI & Google then it seems like people are happy w/ the deal here as well. They don't mind letting these corporations gather their queries & feedback as long as the perceived value they get from the software justifies paying their subscription fee. Politicians understand all this & so they've determined that the people are ok w/ any amount of surveillance as long as they get some amount of utility out of it so they will continue to build out the data centers & surveillance infrastructure. It's not like there aren't satellites already in orbit that can zoom in on a penny in a parking lot anyway so what's a few more data centers & cameras to add to the mix & then pipe the data stream into an AI for "anomaly" detection?
That's why governments do it using face scanning cameras, license plate scanning, downloading social media profiles, uploading all medical data to government servers (minus any large diagnostic data, like images, because that costs too much), demanding FANGs give them access to chats, ... You know, behind people's backs.
Because if figure out what is done with this data, who has access to it, people would never agree to that. For example, youth services uses data on medical treatments people in families receive to find kids to "protect" (ie. abduct). Medical data is also shared with nationalized insurance and hospitals to deny treatments "if it's your own fault" (e.g. find past drug tests in case of organ transplants)
Btw: if you're in the EU, remember, in almost all cases you can refuse a drug test, or any test, and for the love of god, in all cases you want to refuse this. First: the fact that you had a drug test for any reason will be used against you. Second: if for whatever reason it's positive and you need a new heart 20 years later ... best of luck.
The way you know it's gone pretty far is that mass surveillance + AI is being used for parking tickets. How far down the priority list is that?
Imho, these are things people would never agree to if the choice was clearly presented in parliament. No way. And that's in democracies.
