The worst thing for privacy advocates is that there has yet to be a general public reckoning with the ad-economy of the last 20 years.

For all intents and purposes, the average person who has paid no mind to their privacy over that time period is really no better or worse off than the person who has devoted hours to combating all forms of invasion.

If there was a mass scale visible event of privacy loss, i.e. Meta somehow ends up in a shamelessly evil sociopaths hands who decides to start very publicly embarrassing random people with privately collected data, there would be very swift and immediate action (yes the parallels here are not lost on me, scale is the difference)

Just look at datacenters. The public didn't even know what a DC was 6 months ago, and now politicians are getting elected to ban them. What happened? AI gave the mass public a common sensation of fear. Privacy has still not had it's "AI fear" moment.