Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak says the move by governments to retain the metadata of consumers is unethical.
Speaking at a business forum in Sydney, Wozniak said Australia was heading in the same direction as the US, and likened snooping laws to having a neighbour and best friend who had a secret camera in your bedroom for eight years.
"Would he be your friend any more?" he asked.
"That's a lack of ethics. What you expect is what you should get.
"It's unethical in the sense that as a human being, I expect one level of treatment and I'm getting another. There's secrecy, there's peeping."
Wozniak said there had been many examples of similar laws not working.
He also said that today, privacy is a dream and almost gone.
"Every step you take, every message you send, is out there on the web," he said.
The engineer behind the Apple 1 and 2 computers said he hopes one day to be an Australian citizen.
"As a matter of fact, I can not only see myself as a citizen, but some day saying I lived and died as an Australian," he said to applause.
But he had an uncomfortable warning about technological dominance, hypothesising that accident rates for self-driving cars may be so low there may one day end up being laws to stop humans driving.
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