Yours is too thoughtful to be a "rant," and it's worth replying to. You touch on Google and Facebook, who I consider part of my own issues about privacy, freedom and capitalism's influence on human equality.
None of us willingly gives up our privacy, which, when we look at rule of law, stands in negative constitutional space mostly by implication. Literally, privacy exists because of restrictions of government power. Americans only have a "right" to free speech because the government is forbidden from making any law restricting that freedom, and a "right" to a free press because the government is forbidden from making any law to abridge it, a "right" to freely worship because gov may not make any law respecting an establishment of religion, the "right" to peaceably assemble and protest because gov is forbidden from making any law that says they can't. That off-limits gray space is called privacy.
However. Privacy doesn't exist under capitalism's Terms of Service. Privacy, without our consent, with phones on or off, is eliminated when we accept TOS, and our lives' data are collected in any cloud, sold to other clouds, including those of the 3 letter agencies who invented them first and have used them for surveilling the nation since the Bush years. Citizens' constitutional privacy got privatized.
Govt is by our consent to the Constitution, which preserves our privacy.
Business is by our consent to Terms of Service, which cedes our privacy.
I bring this up because you're in the cloud, like it or not. We all are, including those seditionist insurrectionists (and corrupted leaders) who tried to kill off our election process and those we elected to uphold it.
So while we celebrate the apprehension of those delusional enough to "save" their authoritarian idea of America, while they "forgot" any defense of the Constitution over one big lie, we need to remember that the technology that's gathered their data has made that runup possible.
Nice that Big Biz/Big Tech helped save democracy this time, silencing the criminal Q and govt inciters, but Big Biz/Tech sites sure profited from deluded Americans (and the rest of us, for profit and power) in the entire last four years of a fomented runup to the brink.
The partnering of tech and govt this time works in our favor. From the business side it was because the economic stability of their data in the clouds was threatened; they didn't help because Big Biz/Tech has the Constitution written into their terms of service.
Next time, with the wrong leader and wrong relationship between govt and Big Biz, it could go the other way.
My issue about surveillance is that the consent of the governed has been stolen from us.
If we claim we don't care about privacy because we've got nothing to hide, we might as well say we don't care about freedom of press because we don't read, or about freedom of religion because we're atheist (eg, me), etc. To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it to a state actor (eg, the NSA) that trespasses its constitutional restraints. Through the Patriot Act and its NDAA's it's what we've already done -- ceded our life data to both government and "private" tech business whose Terms of Service, we and our elected leaders allowed by signing up.
Has the partnering of private and govt clouds worked to expand our freedom forever? It could. But I won't kid myself that our democracy would survive if in the future, business decides democracy and our "rights" are no longer in its interests.
Sorry for the rant; I just see that what you say points to the heart of how capitalism and democracy now relate. So far, they work. But we have no guarantee until we make Big Biz's terms of service include the Constitution.
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