I hate that tone and way of arguing.
It is as if the author is accusing everyone of buying a surveillance device and then coming up with other uses than being surveyed.
There's a great deal of frustration and fatigue in that comment.
The expectation isn't that the general public would have been aware of that risk. The general public is not sophisticated, and has been greatly misinformed.
The technical world, the firms offering and provisioning devices, the carriers, the financiers and banks behind this, especially, are.
Technology is the art of balancing desired and undesired effects.
For-profit business is the art of externalising risk.
And the heart of finance itself is risk.
There's a very long record of cautions and warnings. They were ignored, largely because in the short term and with suffient levels of externalisation and arabitrage, those risks were profitable.