Facial recognition. Gait recognition. Automated License Plate Readers, many of whom now identify based on make and model. DNA databases. Cellular location tracking. "First responder drones" will become a thing with police departments soon. Cash based transactions are becoming less accepted and every credit card purchase is sold to advertisers (and the feds). For most people in Western countries acting normally, anyone going anywhere or doing anything in the physical world is tracked in a dozen ways. Taking elaborate measures to avoid this surveillance makes you look extremely weird and suspicious to most normal people. Any serious leftist movement dealing with harsh state repression is going to need a reliable toolkit for defeating this stuff.
I don't think this shit can be defeated. Even doing so much as a cash withdrawal adds to your credit profile.
>Cash based transactions are becoming less accepted and every credit card purchase is sold to advertisers (and the feds)
Btw, this happens in plain sight. All your transaction data is sold to credit rating bureaus like TransUnion and Equifax. I'm Indian, and the same happens here. It's worse because here we have a casless payment processing system called UPI, which has gained popularity in recent years. It links directly to your actual bank account too, unlike venmo or paypal that require you to store money in wallets. I've seen alternate data products that scan your SMS history to look for these transactions and create a credit profile based on that. Many banking, insurance and trading platforms integrate these into their applications. So the moment you give them SMS access, they profile you.
You could be a basement dwelling shut-in who never goes outside, but the moment you interact with any banking or insurance systems (which is something everyone has to do) you get profiled. Your transaction and medical history can be used to track you. In fact, in my country it is mandatory for any financial services provider to upload your KYC data to a centralized government database (CERSAI). It's done in the name of fraud prevention, but we all know there are ulterior motives.
All in all, even excluding all the fancy AI-powered surveillance tech available nowadays, governments can still track you. There's no escaping it. Only widespread class-consciousness can make people even start considering this to be important and lay the basis for the collective action needed to counter it. Where I'm at, people literally call you a traitor questioning feds. So yeah, nothing will be happening anytime soon.