I don’t know about inevitable but I imagine that it is such an attractive option to governments that if the technology gets there it will be enacted before laws are passed preventing it, if any ever are. I would include a version of this where it is practically mandatory through incentives like greatly increased cost of insurance, near inability to defend yourself in a court or cross borders if you lacked it, or it just becomes the social norm to give up as much data about yourself as possible.
That said, I also think that if things go well we will have good space technology allowing relatively small communities to live in self sustaining habitats/colony ships which would kind of break any meaningful surveillance.
This is a very off the cuff remark, I haven’t given this topic a great deal of thought before reading this post so make of that what you will.
Honestly, I’m not sure. I read about the biosphere 2 experiments a while ago and they pretty much failed to make a self sustaining colony with only a few people and way more mass than we could practically get into space. I really want us as a species to keep working on that so we can solve any potential problems in parallel with our development of rockets or other launch systems. I could see a space race esque push getting us there in under a decade but there currently isn’t any political or commercial motivation to do that. I don’t know if it would necessarily need a military. I could easily be very wrong but there’s so much space in space and so much stuff on earth trying to conquer a habitat with a few thousand people on it seems a little unnecessary. Italy won’t take over Vatican city, not because they can’t but because there really isn’t a good reason to. As for political freedom, that’s the most speculative of all as I understand it less than the technology. My intuition is that they could simply because a self sustaining colony doesn’t need to produce any surplus a government would be interested in taxing. If you set up an asteroid mining operation I can see all the governments wanting to take a cut of the profits but if all you wanted was to get away from an implicit surveillance state it would have to be truly dystopian to keep you from leaving. As long as you don’t launch anything dangerous toward Earth and you aren’t growing exponentially to the point where you might rival the power of a country and you aren’t engaging in incredibly lucrative trade, the only motivation left to govern you would be control for control’s sake and I guess I’m just optimistic enough to think that there will always be at least one place on earth with high tech that isn’t that dystopian.