The article contends that pervasive government and corporate surveillance—license-plate readers, apps, cameras, facial recognition and always-on devices—has eliminated meaningful privacy and free consent, leaving Americans neither fully free nor able to opt out of data extraction treated as a natural resource.

Long-accepted rationales (no expectation of privacy in public, voluntary use of phones, corporate surveillance outside the Fourth Amendment) have normalized subservience, yet a rapid backlash against Flock Safety automatic license-plate readers has drawn bipartisan criticism from figures including Bernie Sanders, Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley.

Recent hearings and statements by politicians linking mass tracking to constitutional privacy concerns, and rejecting the idea that citizens can simply avoid smartphones, are presented as possible early signs that public and political attitudes toward surveillance and Big Data may be shifting.

If you currently live in the United States, I regret to inform you that you no longer live in a free country. You are no longer a free person. Actually, you haven’t been for quite some time.

This may sound harsh with this being the year America celebrated her big Two-Five-Oh. But think about it. Think back to the last time you drove from your home to the grocery store. How many automatic license plate readers did you pass along the way? How many apps logged your route? What information did your car collect about you and anyone who may have accompanied you? 

When you finally arrived at the store, surely there were cameras, but were they simply there to help catch and deter shoplifters — maybe help police investigate a more serious crime on the off chance one were to occur? Or were those cameras serving other purposes? Was the grocery store implementing facial recognition to deliver you targeted ads when you checked out? Did those cameras automatically link to some local real-time crime center, enabling law enforcement to track you from one location to the next, even if you traveled on foot?

Although your routine trip to pick up eggs and milk may not have been recorded for posterity by all of these technologies, it was by no means a private affair. Nor was your most recent trip to church, a political rally, a protest, or your doctor’s office. And this doesn’t even touch any of the many items in your home that have come to serve as data collection devices.

Now, reflect on this for a moment, then ask yourself: “How much of this did I really consent to?” 

Yes, you chose to drive a car. You chose to have a cell phone. You chose to buy food. But did you choose to have countless government and corporate bodies monitor your every move? Do you really feel like you consented to an arrangement in which any entity with the financial and technological means to record and analyze every detail of your life, from the trivially mundane to the deeply intimate, holds the right to do so? If not, how much do you feel you could demand that they stop?

To return to the initial assertion, if the government and an endless number of corporations can treat the details of your life as some natural resource to be mined, assessed, and sold, and you have no meaningful way to opt out, can you really say you’re a free person? I mean, no, you’re not a slave or a........

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