Comment by Horatio9000

There was mild discontent when the Data Retention laws [1] were being rolled out across the EU in the early 2010s. This was a legal harmonization of existing collection practices for law enforcement purposes. It did receive a lot of press coverage and some small protests (even though in reality the collection was already widespread).

In 2009, Malte Spitz (German Green Party politician) sued his telecom provider for all the information they had stored on him in the last 6 moths. He and others made a good (and spooky) visualization showing how it tracked his entire life [2]. He did a TED talk about it [3], which received a spirited applause and unfortunately minor press coverage.

I think many naively bought the idea that all this detailed data was only for LE (maybe a side effect of all the reporting on the Data Retention Laws?), despite constantly seeing clauses in their EULA's saying their data will be shared with third parties.

----

People only care about these issues once they become evident and widespread, and they personally are affected. I remember the shock my friends had when Google Maps released the location history feature. Up until then, its just a theoretical concern.

Good demonstrations, hard hitting expositions and good press coverage are essential.

----

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention

[2] - https://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protect...

[3] - https://youtu.be/Gv7Y0W0xmYQ