Surveillance economies do have a societal cost, but calling that cost harmful is completely subjective, so the people that choose utility over that cost don't necessarily believe they are harming anything.
I think it is safe to say that intentional and targeted suffering of minority groups directly due to our surveillance society is objectively bad. The only wiggle room here is, as you said, the existence of people who believe that targeting minorities for suffering is a good thing but I surely and dearly hope that we can still call those abhorrent ideas "objectively bad".
Do you think that's the net result, or is just the fact that somebody somewhere is suffering means the rest of us need to turn off the internet and hand in our smartphones?
I have a very hard time believing that the total harm of devices that watch us (actively or potentially) exceeds the actual benefits delivered by those devices.
Yes, 100%.
> I have a very hard time believing that the total harm of devices that watch us (actively or potentially) exceeds the actual benefits delivered by those devices.
This is a false dichotomy logical fallacy. You are incorrectly assuming that all of the good from smartphones comes at a forced, dramatic reduction in privacy. I know this is false because even a kitchen timer with no permissions is a useful element of smartphones that can have 0 privacy concerns.
The invasion of personal privacy at scale has indeed caused enormous societal harm that I personally think quite obviously outweighs any "good" that could come from it - and I also personally think that any "good" done from the direct causing of suffering of others is not in fact good at all.
No, I'm saying that the dramatic reduction in privacy from the typical use of smartphones is more than offset by the benefits.
There's lots of abuses of privacy that I'd like to see reigned in (I would definitely support the introduction of GDPR-like regulations in the US). I'd like to see my search data have the same protections as my video rental or health data.
> any "good" done from the direct causing of suffering of others is not in fact good at all
I assume you are talking about things like the trolley problem. That's something that I've never been able to resolve for myself.