With every technology one must weigh its benefit against the risk of abuse.
Giving someone else the ability to shut off my camera doesn't help me at all (and is in fact something I want not to happen), so all that is left is the risk of abuse. For me that's an easy tradeoff to evaluate.
Sure, but all these examples are about technologies that introduce freedom, not restrictions. The thing about more freedom, is that you have the right, not the obligation, to exercise it. You can choose not to use the phones if you don't trust whoever's running the network. In contrast, the idea behind restrictions is that they are obligatory, not optional.
Because that consumer has a different set of motives than you do.
Every piece of technology you own has limitations, you simply decided that that particular trade-off was worth it in that case. Would your mom care that the police can turn off her camera? Or would she be intrigued that when she goes to Cancun for vacation, she can opt to send you a photo-postcard with CANCUN: WISH YOU WERE HERE! automatically superimposed over the top?
- centralized postal system - "now the government can read your correspondence to other people"
- telephones invented - "now the government can listen to you talking to other people"
- invention of the Web - "now the government can track what you read, watch, etc"
- e-commerce takes off - "now the government can keep records on what you buy"
- GPS becomes popular in cars - "now the government can track where you drive"
- GPS becomes ubiquitous in cell phones - "now the government can track where you walk"
Perhaps we should consider more than just the worse possible way to use a technology when the idea of it is broached.