The responsibility entirely rests in a large part on the shoulders of the geek community - the enablers. I find this entire thread surreal. These were the obvious issues that were front and center way back when chat servers showed up. Some have been raising this issue both publicly and privately since early 90s if not earlier and were marginalized precisely for being bad news bears.

Here is to RMS and his kind.

At this point, if you want a solution, you need to contact your representative and demand data and electronic privacy laws like that which is written in the constitution of Switzerland.

Here's a question: was there a concept of privacy 100 years ago? Or 500? Whenever someone had a baby, or bought a cow, or had an affair on their spouse, didn't everyone in town know about it? Did they ask people's permission when the first telephone book was published?

Or was the first response, "hey, that's an invasion of my privacy!" I doubt anyone said that before the 1950's.

I think privacy is an invention of the late 20th century. I am truly curious if any real notion of "invasion of privacy" existed for most of man's history.