Thanks, I am very interested in the topic of privacy, digital rights, and such things. In a sense the US has such fantastic tools that they don't even need to create centralized apps like the ones China uses on their citizens. When people think Facebook is listening to them on their phones, what's actually happening is that they have so much data on people extracted from phone app usage that their predictive algorithms can seem to be able to determine future events like purchases. I am extremely close to dropping all tech, lol. Too bad that'd make me stand out a lot since I'd become the signal in all the noise. There's no escape from these all-seeing eyes anymore and cameras everywhere storing images on servers running facial recognition software plus drones with thermal imaging technologies and other types of sensors make sure of that. Let's say that I welcome a coronal mass ejection, haha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal