It's not an overreaction. The idea of everyone willingly sharing the details of their every movement with sociopathic corporations who are beholden to national security letters would have been met with ridicule 30 years ago.
Ian Levy, when he was at NCSC spoke about "shame as a weapon against Big Tech". But he missed a crucial flaw - they do not give a fuck. Shame and ridicule only work in societies where people have dignity, self-respect, mutuality and care.
It's true that nobody has any reasonable expectation of privacy when using a Google smartphone. But the ruling talks about "willingly". What does "will" have to do with modern life where people are badgered incessantly to surrender their choice, boundaries, and dignity?
To exercise "will" these days, is quite a big deal, and usually means going against the flow and suffering some loss.
> shame as a weapon against Big Tech
Drop the "without Whatsapp." It's cleaner.
If I ever feel like meeting a woman again our first encounter won't be on a fucking phone app. And that will be just fine.
For what it's worth, mentioning Telegram is even worse because that application is associated with drugs in our country.
What's changed in the meantime, aside from the richness and granularity of location data, is awareness of the potential for the abuse of it all, supported by well-publicized incidents. Which is a good thing; the public is quite tolerant of invisible machinations, as long as they remain distant and abstract.
Keep in mind, these are Mb, not Gb!
Nowadays with a raspberry pi and a 128gb SD card you can go to town on "all location data for the last year for all American cell phones".
Back in 1994, even coordinating reliable central writes of all that location data would have been extraordinarily complicated, and there was not yet a panopticon appetite that would attempt the endeavor without a heavily funded psychopath behind it.
As "we the industry" have gotten more capable (and comfortable) processing huge quantities of data (eg: post map-reduce), and the hardware requirements have fallen to "my cell phone could compute it in an hour", the risk has increased tremendously.
Same story with muskets, cannons and tanks vs AK-47's. "Gun Control" in the musket era is materially different than an era of AK-47's and drones. Same with data processing.