Or worried about anyone else too really. Platforms have had so much fun profiting off data that they chose to democratize the tools which enable random people with zero scruples to violate privacy at scale. The person who's actually spying on you might turn out to be some hobo who wrote an app you downloaded with overly broad permissions. It could be some open source browser extension author who got burnt out and turned to evil. I was just reading a lawsuit a few hours ago where some guys paid lenovo to preinstall a layered service provider on their laptops that decrypts https and proxies it through some service, but this particular time it generated a lot of outrage and attention because it injected ads on the page and broke nodejs. Somehow, that is called a startup.
I think most people get the sense that things like this are happening to them all the time. That their personal space is being violated without their consent. Except on a technical level, it's harder to understand than magic. The only people offering answers unfortunately are the ones who try and galvanize that anger towards big company x or government y, who are also totally culpable too, but for failing to act and defend us from all these micro-tyrants.
"Micro tyrants" - love it. It goes well with my own term, "petty injustice".
I do object to "it's harder to understand than magic". I think that's a failure in communication, in pedagogy, and perhaps most broadly, the poor priorities of our major information systems, which include homes, schools, churches, the boy scouts, and all mass media. The profit motive should itself be deeply suspect with respect to any information service.
I don't believe it is difficult to understand the nature of your phone and how it works. You hint at it with your term - it's about size. Your phone is essentially a vast machine (truly vast, like a city block) that has been shrunk down. Your screen is a camera into that tiny city, so its like a microscope. As we move around, we can mark particularly interesting or useful views, so that we can come back to them (and even arrange them side-by-side). We find that we not only have the ability to see, but also to emit into the image, changing it, adding to it. (It might get tricky once you recognize that movement itself must constitute an emission if we are to be consistent, and this would be the invitation to look at the text of the code, which ideally be written with this intuition in mind.)
But yes, let us put an end to all the micro-tyrants and the petty injustices they subject us to!
I think most people get the sense that things like this are happening to them all the time. That their personal space is being violated without their consent. Except on a technical level, it's harder to understand than magic. The only people offering answers unfortunately are the ones who try and galvanize that anger towards big company x or government y, who are also totally culpable too, but for failing to act and defend us from all these micro-tyrants.