What happens when your phone is spying on you

With spy tech, even if I take just about every step there is to take, even full blown luddism does not get me the world that was. These days, being a private person takes real money ( vide FB Zuckerberg buying property to ensure privacy on his real estate ).

You do have a point nonetheless, which brings me to this: what is an acceptable restriction on it to you?

This has been apparent since "Carnivore" was revealed to not be a conspiracy theory, but an actual system in THE LATE NINETIES, and ECHELON since the 1960s. And since then I would roughly say computing power is 20-40x more powerful (5x the gigahertz, 8x the cores), and storage is probably 1000x more scalable (40GB/280$ vs 14TB/200$).

I have no idea how old you are, but three years ago, heck that is well past the point you should have been aware of this. Look:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

That was revealed in 2006. Basically, the crux of it was that there were "secret rooms" like that in EVERY SINGLE telco. Well, except apparently Qwest, which blew my mind at the time because they were the worst regional telco of them all, so the fact they stood their ground was a total anomaly in their usual monopoly extraction sociopathy.

One big sign of this is Tiktok. Tiktok is an attempt by the Chinese to subvert the normal monopoly the FBI has with social networks, since the US/EU governments are working with US/EU companies for facebook, twitter, etc. But Tiktok is Chinese.

So Tiktok looks like just another social network to a typical social network junkie, but then you read all these headlines where congress and the EU wants to ban it, seemingly strangely up in arms over just another video social network, and .... that's because the Chinese are doing what the US/EU have done for 25+years. The US government has ITS toys, and doesn't want the Chinese to take them.

That should clue you in to how much the government likes have total information access to social networks that are US/EU based.

A lot of this could be swallowed if the US exhibited healthy signs of a functioning democracy, instead it is another sign of an emerging postmodern totalitarian state. The last hope of this was our judicial branch, which has been so thoroughly compromised by 30 years of partisan nominations (read: pro-elite in all cases) and Iraq war case law that it will never go back.

I would stay quiet, but by the time I realized what was going on I had 10+ years of data on me. It doesn't matter anymore.

One thing that definitely seems uncontroversial is protection for spaces that have an expectation of privacy. Obviously no democratic state has any business allowing AirBNB bathroom cameras, since basically nobody aside from criminals wants that to exist, and by extension any space that specifically claims to be private should have the same protection.

Requiring a "Facebook moderators may access these chat logs under some conditions" notice at the beginning of everything someone might otherwise think was private seems reasonable.

What I have more of an issue with is defining new spaces with that expectation.

The government should probably have stricter rules than everyone else on privacy, since they are the main group who both can and possibly might want to actually make use of data to harm an average person.

Digital search warrants and subpoenas have solved real problems, so I wouldn't want to get rid of those entirely, but there could be a central logging facility where you can get access to any data they have on you, get notified instantly (Or within a time limit that expires if you are arrested, if there's a need to temporarily seal it to prevent tipping off a murderer) of any new accesses, and appeal the decision that allowed them to access it, so they can't just rubber stamp give it to everyone without any transparency.

Encryption should be permanently made a right, along with anonymity networks like Tor, and Cryptocurrency in general(Although maybe not proof of work, and I sure wouldn't want to become an everyday thing we all have to deal with).

The big problem with spying is that it's just observing people and telling others what you saw, you can't fully eliminate spying without eliminating an important part of free speech.

In general, the GDPR seems to get things mostly right, but I still think the best solution is actually having private alternatives people actually would use by choice, and making sure those are legally protected.