> However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance?
I think this is a basic question of our time, because we introduce so many devices into our lives from various areas that all collect data. I feel that even if you do "privacy conscious" data collection, the data will still land in the hands of others. A lot of the data is also never even entering a device that you own but is always controlled by third parties (like infrastructure operators, shop owners (CCTV), etc).
Sometimes I feel like technology has inherent impacts, no matter how much you want it to not have that impact, because it makes some uses of it really easy while making others really hard. Like copying data is so immensely easy now, to a degree that it's hard to not copy data.
Think of the CCTV example for example. You might be a privacy conscious shop operator so you don't have a CCTV system set up. However, in your street there are 5 other shops, 2 not connected to the internet, 3 which are, and one with bad security that doesn't need password logins. Now you personally have tried to not collect data on your customers, but as the customers walk down the street to your shop, they come across all the other shops, and their images even land in the public internet.
Right now, the impact is countered by video data being so horribly hard to process, taking so much space, etc. So that publicly accessible CCTV system only lets attackers obtain footage of the last 3 days. But eventually, as computers improve, CCTV operators will add facial recognition features, and maybe store the data obtained for longer periods, because the info whether some person walked down the road takes up way less space, so operators might opt to store it for weeks and years.
Suddenly, someone accessing that one CCTV system with bad security has access to the last 10 years of pedestrians walking down the road, and it's only a 10 GB sqlite database (which by then will likely be not much data).
This effect is not just local to CCTV operators, but can be seen everywhere. If a car manufacturer collects telemetry to improve their car product, and does it for all their fleet, they might build a database spanning decades. One day they might get hacked or think it's a good idea to sell that data to insurances, municipalities or whatever. The car manufacturer might not even do it, but you also carry a phone with you with google maps/grindr installed, etc, or it's the municipality which has installed license plate checking CCTV on the road. Or it's the mobile network operators because the cars have to use some means to talk to the car companies. Etc.