You don't know if it's being watched or not, you don't know if its event triggered or always-on, or how anything you say and do is contextualised. You only know it may be used against you at any time.
What it crystallises for me is the implicit "if you are pure you have nothing to fear" quality in these things. The idea that the loss of privacy is inhibiting and that this kind of law is antithetical to a fundamental expectation of privacy as a right. Many places have no written constitutional norms in this space, and so the right to privacy is assumed, not codified. (and, it would be equally simplistic to assume codified rights necessarily enshrine them or strengthen them)
