I would assume that most people who read Nineteen Eighty-Four understand that the Party is supposed to be the bad guy. However, most politicians and a large number of corporations seem to believe the Party is the good guy and should be emulated as closely as Snes9x attempts to emulate the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
It seems like every day we see news of new surveillance technologies either being mandated by politicians of voluntarily implemented by corporations. The two entities aren’t always intentionally working in tandem. Many of the surveillance technologies implemented by corporations are done for profit. Google and Facebook for example have business models dependent on surveillance. But sometimes they two entities are working in tandem. The Pegasus spyware is an example of a protect developed by a corporation for the obvious intent of selling to governments interested in surveilling individuals. Then there are the gray ares. Apple’s recent decision to install spyware on iOS devices to ostensibly detect child pornography is an example of something that was likely implemented at the behest of politicians but not mandated (yet).
Unfortunately, the situation is unlikely to get better before it gets worse. There’s too much money to be made by spying on customers and politicians’ power necessarily depends on surveilling citizens. Does this mean you will have to give up technology entirely? Will the Hutterites and Amish be the only free people left in a few years? Not necessarily. There is an option to utilize technology without subjecting yourself to constant surveillance. That option is to do it yourself.
This is really an extension of my self-hosting advocacy. For a long time I’ve preached and practiced self-hosting online services. It’s much harder for Google to surveil your e-mail if you host your own server (of course Google can still surveil your conversations with Gmail users). However, at the current rate of things the do it yourself strategy will have to be applied to technological products other than online services. For example, there is no longer a privacy respecting smartphone readily available to consumers. Your only option is to buy a device that both allows you to flash custom firmware and is supported by privacy respecting firmware.
The laptop and desktop market at least has a few privacy respecting options like System76 available, but beyond those boutique manufacturers you can’t trust the default operating system shipped with most computers. You need to install an operating system that you can trust such as a Linux distro or one of the open BSD flavors like OpenBSD and FreeBSD. There is also the issue of surveillance technology baked into the hardware. Just installing a trustworthy operating system isn’t enough if the hardware itself is spying on you too. In that case you’re going to have to build your own hardware to some extent. This will require many of the same skills as building a computer does today except instead of choosing parts for performance, you’ll need to choose parts for lack of baked in surveillance technology.
If you want an automobile that won’t spy on you, you’ll likely need to either maintain automobiles that were manufactured prior to surveillance mandates or learn how to disable installed surveillance technology. Mind you that either strategy could and most likely will be declared illegal. In that case you will need to spoof the surveillance technology in such a way that it isn’t tampered with in a detectable manner or can be quickly restored to a fully functional state if you need to take the vehicle in for an inspection or repair.
For those unwilling to unable to do the work themselves, they will be dependent on black market dealers who can. The upside is there is already a black market for surveillance avoidance and it will expand as surveillance becomes more pervasive. But the days of being able to buy a technological product and be reasonably sure that it isn’t spying on you are over (they’ve been over for a while, but the situation is continually becoming worse).