Unfortunately from what I see in history it's not usually until people are having trouble feeding their families that the people seize power back from government and short of that nothing will change. Ideological movements not related to our Maslow's-hierarchy-of-needs do come up and cause change but they're the exception and I'm not holding my breath.
HN crowd is more enlightened than most and I still see widespread hook-line-and-sinker consumption of 100% corrupt corporate media narratives on here.
People -- and I will call out my fellow Americans in this -- don't seem to really care until it directly affects them and in significantly adverse ways. Up until that point, the attitude seems to be "I can still get by" and by the time that's not true, it's generations too late. But, hey, as long as you got yours, why should you care about your neighbor, right?
The people being referred to in the above comment aren't people who have thought in any depth about the issue of privacy and the boundaries that should be put in place to prevent abuse of violation of individual privacy and come to a contrary opinion. It's about people who are so completely heads down in their tiny vision of work and life that they've never really thought about the issue and only see things like "individual right to privacy" as annoying roadblocks they have to deal with to do what they're paid to do.
The annoyance and frustration is with the apathy towards and issue, not with contradictory opinions.
People don't study history and so we're doomed to repeat it. The reason why the Nazi holocaust of jews was most effective in the Netherlands is because of how incredible that country's record keeping was. You could argue that the violation of privacy might not be terribly abused today, but the people in charge today won't be in charge forever.