The fact that they try to keep everything under surveillance is not new and the phenomenon is expanding at a very fast rate, although in some cases common sense starts to prevail (CMIIW, but I think that public face recognition postponed in Europe until the software gets more mature and harder to be abused).
The last thing I read regarding facial recognition was this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-facial-recognition.htmlI followed the story a bit more and ended up on this article:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/facial-recognition-london-inaccurate-met-police-trials-a8898946.htmlThe TL;DR is that London Police are rolling out mass surveillance and facial recognition, despite it having a 96% false positive rate, and physically stopping and handing out fines to people who pull scarves or hoods over their face to avoid it.
And honestly, I wouldn't even care if the system had a 100% accuracy rate. You do not have the right to harvest the faces of innocent people without grounds or any reason to suspect them of a crime, add it to your database, link it to a bunch of other information you have "obtained" about them, all without their consent or probably even their knowledge.
This is not an isolated case. Facial recognition is being trialled/rolled out all over the world.
ToR is not illegal. So I can hope that Monero will also not become illegal. It's just a clever software after all.
Tor is not illegal
yet. There have been plenty of politicians and administrations who want to "ban encryption", or some other such nonsense, until someone who isn't a moron points out that doing so would break the entire internet. If we continue not caring about our privacy and electing these kinds of people, it will only be a matter of time.