This sounds less like a complaint about breach of privacy, but more of complaint about information asymmetry -- where the powerful have access to the data, while the commoners have not.
An obvious way to level the field is privacy, so that nobody has access to anybody else's information; another way would be transparency, so it's difficult for the power to hide their abuse of power.
No, that isn't a viable strategy. This Hacker News thread is evidence that transparency of some kind exists, and that public scrutiny is completely, 100% inconsequential for the elite.
Information asymmetry exists as a continuum and less as definitive states. Say, what if the avg person could boot up an NSA terminal to be able to search (and everyone know that they are logged in and searching) the database? That, to me, would seem to be on the other side of the spectrum than it is now, and I highly doubt that would be 100% inconsequential for the current elite. Would something like this possibly enable a future elite, possibly (as all systems seem be good at doing eventually), but at least it will be a change of the status quo where the few can leverage an information advantage against the masses.
And if the startup I've founded with a friend and been working on for two years is any proof of concept of something like that working (yes we are revenue generating as of a month ago, and growing with plenty of things in the pipeline), I beg to differ. We have managed to get people who never would have heard of/or read Hacker News to care (because we made it relevant to their everyday lives in ways they can see the manifestation of their collective behaviors these past decades) about mass surveillance/data collection and acknowledge that as a society if we have collectively let things get to this point, to think that a roll back of the technical capabilities of governments/corporations/other organizations through political pandering will placate, is naive at best. Here's a post I made before the Snowden leaks[0]. I think about these things everyday, and work on ways to show that the emperor of mass surveillance is naked for everyone to see if they remove their hands from their eyes and plugs from their ears because perhaps at the end of the day, we will only see ourselves in front of the mirror reflecting upon our individual and collective actions we make everyday.
Interesting idea. But not practical, I think. The mighty will always find ways to hide their doings and as you can see at the current state, those with the bigger resources will always win in such a battle.
An obvious way to level the field is privacy, so that nobody has access to anybody else's information; another way would be transparency, so it's difficult for the power to hide their abuse of power.