"Liberty" might not be completely off the mark. You can get into the habit of looking over your own shoulder all the time, interrogating your every expression and action for what an unsympathetic stranger might make of it and how it might be used against you. And that consciousness doesn't only extend to spaces where you know you're being monitored, because you can't know where and when and how you're being monitored. So you eventually experience it all the time.
This isn't intended as a shallow dismissal, but this sounds strikingly similar to the experience of paranoia. Nobody would say that the feeling that the Invisible Other is watching us is a good feeling. But unless something happens, it's also "just" a feeling. Might the feeling be doing more harm than the reality?
On the other hand, our ancestors would probably wonder at our obsession over the danger of invisible entities getting into our food or water, but germ theory is still real.
The problem with guarding against invisible dangers, even when they're real, is that they can be hard to distinguish from superstition. It's easy to point at some religious customs and say they are irrational, but is today's folk understanding of nutritional science all that much better? Badly understood science can create especially virulent memes.
When the harms are hard to demonstrate, privacy disputes sometimes feel similar.
It’s funny: to you this reads as paranoia, but if anything I’m drawing on my experience of social anxiety. Which, yes, is irrational, because no one is watching. The point of the discussion at hand is that, in an environment pervaded by automated, recorded invasion of privacy, such feelings may cease to be irrational.
Liberty is the best way to describe it. It's not that we're necessarily having any autonomy taken from us right now, but surveillance does increase the power others have over us.
Unfortunately words like "Liberty", "Freedom", "Justice" and others have been ambiguous for so long that they can be twisted on a whim.
The idea is that two people can be talking about the same thing, both with different ideas (and plausible deniability) in their head.
Even privacy policies have their own form of ambiguous polite euphemisms, such as "advertising" or "telemetry" or "analytics", which would benefit from clarifying translations.
