I ran across this guy the other day, and although some of the material linked to his site is questionable, the logic and observations in the video on this page make sense:

I like his point about keeping an eye on the actual truth - not some made-up narrative which someone thinks is in our best interests. That's a slippery slope coz then you have people justifying certain courses of actions based on a false premise - that's the 'out in the weeds'system of government he's talking about where you lose track of what it was supposed to be about in the beginning.

When reading articles I'm sometimes struck by comparisons to the 2017 flu epidemic in Australia which killed 1257 people here. You could just as easily insert that flu for Covid-19 - it was a new strain - very nasty - killed a lot of people - way more than Covid-19. Were those lives less precious? This is where the truth gets twisted and used to justify things like mass personal surveillance.

The Hong Kong protest i saw as making a fantastic stand in the battle of data control - now that seems to have been quashed - or relegated to 'not important in the circumstances'. That's a shame coz now we need that kind of pushback - especially from our young people like in Hong Kong - against this insipid data scraping more than ever.