We cannot afford to be indifferent to internet spying (2013)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> However, I believe that we have turned a corner: we have finally attained Peak Indifference to Surveillance. We have reached the moment after which the number of people who give a damn about their privacy will only increase.
While I have seen a slight increase in interest, have we really turned a corner in the last five years? Certainly the EU has started to change the rules on privacy, but I haven't seen a dramatic increase of giving a d*mn in the general populace.
Pew research gives a good lay of the land for the US [1]
The tldr: 70% believe it's for a purpose other than stated, 25% have changed the way they interact with technology, 27% believe content is being snarfed, 57% disapprove of use on US citizens.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/04/how-american...
2.) https://www.torproject.org
3.) https://openprivacy.ca/blog/2018/06/28/announcing-cwtch/
Tor is an obvious choice here and has penetrated the mainstream when Gawker ran that article on Silk Road. Now and then newspapers run sensationalist articles on the Dark Web in an attempt to wake up the masses about Tor and its famous (unsecure) Browser Bundle.
There are some contenders for that, but progress has been slow.
Well the state of the art seems to be Whonix[1] and Qubes[2],and TailsOS[3]
The idea behind these Operating Systems is that even if you somehow got hacked, it limits the damage caused. For example, in Qubes you can open a potentially malicious PDF in a separate dedicated Fedora template/image, then delete the VM after viewing the PDF.
With Whonix/Tails, you can also limit the damage caused, so if some intel agency decides to drop an 0day/RCE vuln in your Tor Browser session, then your real IP can't be leaked, because it defaults to Tor for all network activity (and spoofs the MAC address in the case of TailsOS).
But for the 'average person' as you describe, these tools are typically not within their threat model. I can understand journalists and marginalized communities using them, but not run-of-the-mill users who like to Skype grandma on their Windows machine and have Internet Explorer as their main browser.
If I was a government with the goal of total surveillance nirvana, I'd do it the same way as I'd eat an elephant, one bite at a time. Programmatically reducing the expectation of privacy through invasive technology and policies at the maximum speed possible that does incite a revolt.
Allow massive corporations such as Google/Facebook/Amazon free reign to spy on the entire population, then share in their spoils courtesy of the third party doctrine and/or trading political favors and protection for access to surveillance data.