Really? 20 years ago, tech people realized that billions would be carrying electronic devices that pinged their location and constantly phoned home to 6-10 large corporations?
Yeah, that was the general consensus about what the future would be.
In 1999, only the original Blackberry and Palm VII "could" do mobile data. I use quotation marks because they both relied on a very rickety, bandwidth constrained Mobitex network that could barely send and receive text-only emails for a few hundred concurrent users, let alone real-time geolocation and web browsing data across billions of devices. Even then, Blackberry had to route every single email through their own servers to compress it before transmission.
Blackberry's business model, like Apple's, was built around an integrated hardware-software solution. There was no incentive to sell their data to advertisers. That only started with the search and social media companies that had no other way of making money.
So yes. Tech people have been aware of the privacy issues for a while.