It's too damn complicated for level 1 techs, let alone end users and the general public, to attempt to opt of surveillance, or even intelligently express their dissatisfaction with government and corporate policies.

Politicians don't care and corporations do. These policies will persist until people's lives are strongly negatively affected. Will it require significant damage as a result of foreign powers hacking into the industrial grid? Probably. God knows we aren't in the streets protesting TSA security theater, and its difficult to get more privacy invasive than seeing folks naked.

And under Firefox, don't forget to tweak your about:config:

If you don't need them, WebGL and WebRTC are just big security holes:

Not privacy-related, but...

I'm sure that's what the Saurian dinosaur astronomers told their people.

Look, just operate under the general assumption that we live in a Police State that makes Eastern German Stasi look like kindergarten cops.

Then you'll be a good serf.

Is it unconstitutional and illegal?

Of course.

Will they do anything about it that actually changes anything?

No.

(obligatory Star Trek reference)

Obelix is fun at parties, unless he gets stoned, but Oberon can bring a party down.

Not true. Climate change alters basic acidity of oceans, revives ancient diseases trapped in polar ice, and the interconnected nature of society and trade may result in conflicts where one person decides to start a nuclear war as billions are forced to migrate or die.

Look, I love that you civilians think it's not a problem, but you've never had to deal with what people pushed to the edge actually DO when they either leave their nation state or die. They will do whatever they have to, and that is very very dangerous. When people think they're trapped, they do amazing things.

I'm far more worried about Oberon than about Asterisk.

Man-made climate change, which is 120 percent of all GHG emissions worldwide (yes, I said more than 100 percent), is an actual risk.

If humans die from a giant asteroid, nobody will notice we're gone.

To the contrary, Java's lack of expressiveness resulted in people writing tons of external XML files, code generators, DI frameworks, and build tools to glue the whole mess together. Instead of small, judicious bits of cleverness in the main language/runtime, it's been pushed to very clever tools on the periphery that come with relatively large learning curves. That's not really a win from the readability standpoint.