It is beginning already.
The article below is a bit dramatic, but Obama assuring Americans that he is targeting foreigners doesn't make the problem smaller.
This is a commercial catastrophe for the US.
"To effect change we are left with a boycott in everything but name. It means that non-US Western businesses need to start using "not subject to US law" as a marketing point. We need cloud providers and software vendors that don't have a US presence, no US data centers, no US employees - no legal attack surface in that nation of any kind. Perhaps most critical of all, we need a non-American credit-card company.
If enough of us start to pull our technology purchases out of the US they will indeed sit up and take notice; money leaving the country may well be one of the only things that will ever cause them to do so.
America still believes in its own manifest destiny; the problem is that it has lost its way and the very values it seeks to export to the rest of the world have become corrupt. I do not want the legal solution to the Western world's US privacy and liberty dichotomy to be the export of America's neo-Orwellian panopticon. (If you are Australian or Canadian you can download 1984 for a reminder here.)
We can no longer afford to allow apathy to direct our judgement. We must show our governments that we stand behind them; that we believe in privacy and personal liberty enough to invest only in privacy-bloc countries. Through our actions – which can be as simple as choosing which cloud vendor you use for e-mail – we need to give our nations a sense of international unity and the strength of will to stand up to American negotiators and say "hold, enough!"
The power to quite literally change the world rests not in the hands of the unknowable, inscrutable government suit that negotiates agreements in secrecy on your behalf. That power belongs to each and every one of us expressed through something as simple as where we choose to invest the money we spend. I believe it is our duty to choose wisely and to make those choices based on more than mere pragmatism."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/08/what_about_a_us_tech_boycott/
And then, recalling this from Eric Schmidt of Google:
"Let me be very clear that Google is not tracking you...it's not doing all these things," Schmidt said, after trying to interject Roubini's question several times, to clarify that this was a hypothetical discussion. "Does everyone get that we're not doing this? He's talking about a different company or set of companies."
"This lack of a delete button on the Internet is in fact a significant issue."
Schmidt then explained that Roubini's assessment of the future was not one he agreed with. "I think you're describing a world of tracking which I think is highly unlikely to occur, because people will be upset about it in the same way you are," Schmidt said. "Governments won't allow it, and it'll be bad business. And ultimately, in a competitive market, companies want the consumers to be happy. So it's true tracking in this context...you're taking a much broader view of the word ['tracking'] than any I would use. A situation where you go to people and say, 'Oh, here's our phone, and we're going to track you to death,' people are not going to buy that phone. It's just a bad business model."
The issue, however, is that it's actually turned out to be a very good business model for many tech companies, especially in the mobile market. Targeted mobile advertising is becoming increasingly crucial to the bottom lines of companies like Google and Facebook; last quarter, for example, mobile advertising revenue represented roughly 30% of Facebook's ad revenue. Yet recent studies indicate many people are wary of growing data collection. And the average user is confronted with a general lack of transparency regarding what data is being tracked and for what purposes.
Though market competition (or regulation) may dispel some inappropriate corporate uses of personal data tracking, the likelihood is the more ways we interact with technology, the more data we're likely to share--perhaps unknowingly.
Schmidt does not believe this to be the case. "Not everyone is going to track all your behavior," he stressed. "There is no central Borg tracking all of these things."
http://www.fastcompany.com/3009390/tech-forecast/googles-eric-schmidt-on-data-privacy-the-internet-needs-a-delete-button
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