>Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat, and people will be motivated to do so.
>[Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future]
Um, this is pretty easy to refute: we've been complaining about copyright and DRM for ages now, and not only are they not waning, they're at least as strong now as they've ever been. There's no indication whatsoever that copyright law is going anywhere or being relaxed in any way, in fact it's the opposite. Sure, it's generally easy to copy digital stuff (absent DRM), but that doesn't make it legal, nor has the internet become a free-for-all (quite the opposite in fact; it's more dangerous to commit copyright violations now than ever I think). Same goes for DRM: despite all the complaints, DRM is still present in many places, and you still need to use it for things like watching Netflix. It is possible to defeat it (I'm not going to say technically easy though, because a lot of it is unbroken), but what the DRM-users have proven to us is that it's non-trivial now, and more importantly it only has to be "good enough": as long as it prevents most users from doing something the copyright holder doesn't want, that's all they really care about.
I don't really recognise any of what you're describing here - it's trivial to download almost any copyrighted work in seconds, for free, and basically nobody suffers any consequences for doing so.
Even so, it was just an analogy. There's very little stopping people just following you round recording you on their smartphone as it is. When it's semi-autonomous flying robots the size of a grain of rice, I don't believe you are going to have much legal recourse.
You're not talking about downloading copyright works, you were talking about "the death of copyright". Copyright isn't dead, it's alive and well, regardless of how easy it is to download stuff.
Not only that, while it may be easy to download stuff, it's also easy to be sued for it, and this has happened countless times. There's been a whole industry of suing downloaders and getting them to settle for $3k. So your assertion that "nobody suffers any consequences for doing so" is quite false. Ask Jammie Thomas.
Yes, you can largely avoid this by using a VPN, but not that many people do.
Um, this is pretty easy to refute: we've been complaining about copyright and DRM for ages now, and not only are they not waning, they're at least as strong now as they've ever been. There's no indication whatsoever that copyright law is going anywhere or being relaxed in any way, in fact it's the opposite. Sure, it's generally easy to copy digital stuff (absent DRM), but that doesn't make it legal, nor has the internet become a free-for-all (quite the opposite in fact; it's more dangerous to commit copyright violations now than ever I think). Same goes for DRM: despite all the complaints, DRM is still present in many places, and you still need to use it for things like watching Netflix. It is possible to defeat it (I'm not going to say technically easy though, because a lot of it is unbroken), but what the DRM-users have proven to us is that it's non-trivial now, and more importantly it only has to be "good enough": as long as it prevents most users from doing something the copyright holder doesn't want, that's all they really care about.