It looks like the miscommunication was _to_ him, not _from_ him. He was called in to collect his stuff, but then not fired once he got in with his boss.
Personally, I had no trouble following the article.
If you disagree, can you provide a desired end point that you believe actually protects privacy, and a roadmap to get to this point?
I personally don't see a path to an end point where there is no collection and aggregation of personal data, be it by state actors, corporations, or private citizens.
The actual most likely outcome that I see is official regulation of personal data collection and aggregation by corporations and private citizens as in the EU. Those laws explicitly allow state actors to actively collect and aggregate tracking data.
However, nothing technical actually prevents corporate and private actors from doing so, at the cost of a fine if they are caught. The actions that might have some effect on data collection (like obscuring license plates) are prohibited by laws that ease the collection of data by state actors.
This will continue to be exploited, although additional resources available to certain groups - the wealthy, those associated with corporations and state actors, and (to some extent) the technically skilled that put much of their available skills and resources toward staying private - will enable concealing of some private data.
This is already essentially the current state of affairs, though. Anyone with the required resources can use either legal, quasi-legal, or illegal means to do this sort of thing. Note the recent discussion of the system for intel available to repo operators.
I don't personally think it's a great outcome - in fact I think it's a pretty bad one.
However, I do think that that the outcome of universal access to surveillance is the best one that has any slim likelihood at all of coming to pass - all of the other actually possible outcomes are worse.
So, we all see the problem already. Do you have a plan that will actually solve the issue?
Data will continue to be collected, be it by state entities, corporations, or private citizens. It will keep happening whether it's declared illegal or not, as it's become clear that there's no working oversight of the state actors in particular.
'No one gets access' has never been an option, though. It was impossible once ALPR/ANPR, or even the base technologies - OCR, large databases, and networking - were developed.
Personally, I had no trouble following the article.