this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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IMO the thing is that people don't care about their privacy. Sure, some people around here do, but your average person owns an Alexa, has a FB/Instagram account and constantly posts their location, uses the same password on many sites, uses TikTok, doesn't block cookies, etc etc etc.
Most people don't actually care. Some claim they do, but then can't even be bothered to stop using Instagram etc because of the "inconvenience"... So do they really care?
Some companies (Apple, etc) push their products under a narrative around safety and security, and people will repeat that point as a way to justify a decision they already made, but if they actually cared, they would be doing other things too. But they don't.
The number of us who do actually care about privacy and security is actually very small.
Exactly this. Most people care about convenience above all else. People want their software to "just work" without having to fiddle with settings or add-ons or anything else.
The average person owns a smartphone. I cannot fathom how anyone thinks a device that sits in one place is a bigger threat than one with greater capabilities that you carry with you all the time.
I think about this every day, but I keep coming back to this: they do care. It's just that they don't always know they care, or to what extent. The big problem is that there's virtually no way to visualize the harm in using privacy-invading products and services. Everything that goes on in the background of our phones, we'd never tolerate in real life.
If you could visually see every time there's a background process, an app activating the mic, the sensors, the location, accessing your messages, etc., we'd be in a better position.
There's no way we'd tolerate the IRL equivalents of what goes on digitally—at the browser level, at the app level, perhaps even at the OS level.
It's usually visual cues that set off change. Think about it this way: 9/11 killed ~3000 people and we got the USA PATRIOT Act virtually overnight. COVID-19 happened and killed ~1.1 million people in the US alone. But because COVID wasn't as "visual" and as "graphic" as 9/11, there was less urgency to do something about it.
I am one of those people. Nothing bad has ever happened to me in the decades I've been putting my info online beyond a bad actor getting ahold of my credit card info for a minute. I just don't see the issue when companies with my data actively make my life better..?
It could happen to you, but it has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen to other people. And you enable it happening to other people by participating in it.
Here's a good example
Here's another where the police used Facebook messages to target a woman getting an abortion
Just take one look at China to see the kind of dystopian future we're heading toward. Look up Zhima credit. Look up what happens to protestors.
The short version is, your government can easily turn fascist at a moment's notice, and when it does there's no way to claw back all that data you put out there.
I don't give a single shit about what Google or Facebook has on me, other than the fact that they give a backdoor to that data to every government body that asks.