Here’s my personal answer to that question. I care about privacy. However, maintaining it has become a never ending process that gets more complicated as time goes on. Plus there’s always more one could do. I’m not going to stop using payment cards, I’m not going to get a prepaid phone running graphene, I’m not going to whatever comes next.

I’m starting to think that my personal cost/benefit analysis is leaning towards not caring about privacy. What have I gotten out of trying to maintain privacy? Inconvenience and expense. What have I gained from letting the creepy corpo overlords watch me? A decent map app, autocorrect, 3% cash back at restaurants and groceries, facebook marketplace. It really seems like I get services and discounts for giving up my privacy.

I even signed up for that fucking global entry program so I can have TSA precheck and get through customs fast. I hate that. It feels so wrong but I’m growing increasingly sure it doesn’t matter. I’m not special, the government won’t care about me now or in the future, and the benefits of not caring outweigh the gains of trying to hide.

This is a terrible point of view, I know, but I just don’t care anymore. I like the idea of privacy, but I’m finding the practicality to be too difficult.

I was talking to a friend the other day and she mentioned she’d searched for a product online and then started getting ads for it, and asked how often it’d happened to me. She was very surprised when I said never and I explained that I’d been using an ad blocker for the last 15 years. And by the end of our conversation I’d walked her through setting it up on her devices and now she’s one step closer to regaining her privacy

I often find people really aren’t happy with their privacy being undermined but they don’t realise there are things they can do about it. They’ll say things like “well it’s happening to everyone else too” as a coping mechanism but it’s not something they want. More education is critical

A lot of people buy in to the argument that authorities should be able to conveniently take down bad people, and limiting privacy expectations is a way to do that.

It’s such a short sighted perspective, outsourcing the future to men who yearn for power like that.

I’ve never asked them because I don’t care why they don’t care.

They know I am willing to help if they decide to start caring.

I really find that most people I talk to do care about privacy. If I ask a person why they have window blinds and black out curtains, they will most likely say ‘to give me privacy’. Why do you have a key that goes to the lock on your front door? Well, that’s to prevent unauthorized access. So, the average person on the street does value privacy, security, and anonymity, there is just this disconnect between their daily real life, and their digital life. They just may not understand that in 2025, there is no real defining line between their real lives and their digital lives. It’s one in the same.

I don’t know too many people that would let me come into their house, use their resources to profit my company, without giving them due compensation. That would be ludicrous. Yet, they just don’t understand that this is exactly what happens with their digital data. Your data is bought and sold as a commodity, on a cyclical basis to bolster the profits of a corporation, without giving you due compensation. In 2025, surveillance capitalism and governmental surveillance are teaming up. More coverage.

So, yes, I would say that the common man in the street does value privacy, they just don’t quite understand the complexities that are going on behind the pretty pictures on their computer monitor. We, as the ‘enlightened’ are charged with educating the masses in lieu of condemning them for what they don’t understand.

Beyond my frustration at this being buried in a video podcast, I also would rather promote why people should be worried about privacy in a concrete and direct way.

The Cascading Impact of Privacy Loss

Concrete Example: A 10-Year Timeline

Year 0: You’re a healthy middle-class person who “has nothing to hide”

Year 3: Your insurance premiums inexplicably rise. You don’t know your fitness tracker data was sold and correlated with your grocery purchases.

Year 5: Passed over for promotion. Algorithm flagged social media posts about work stress as “low resilience indicator.”

Year 7: Attend peaceful protest. Face-recognition adds you to databases. Now randomly selected for “additional screening” at airports.

Year 9: Can’t get affordable loan. Your zip code + purchase history + social network = high risk score. The specific formula is proprietary.

Year 10: Chronic condition develops. Can’t get treatment covered - insurer says it’s “pre-existing” based on data you didn’t know they had from a DNA test you took for fun in Year 2.

Your lifespan: Statistically reduced by 5-10 years compared to privacy-protected cohort.

Privacy isn’t about “having something to hide.” It’s the immune system of human dignity, economic fairness, political freedom, and literally - survival.

Without it, you become a data object to be optimized for others’ profit and control, not a human with agency over your own life.

Because people who don’t have to be taught the value of it by someone they respect and enjoy being around

People change for people they care about half of the time and the other half when they have sudden realizations that click for them

Of course they do. Just ask any random person if you can look at everything on their phone.

It’s a combination of ignorance, convenience, social pressure. They prioritize those over some amount of privacy violations.

They believe any data given to google or other data collecting sites isn’t that intrusive, or if it is, won’t be read by a person etc. Its a nihilistic philosophy, that “They already have it all anyway.”

Because they don’t care about housing either. Unless they’re affected somehow.

Fucking great question.

I’m guessing because giving it away doesn’t have immediate consequences, and when the consequences come the cause is so far behind that it’s divorced in their minds and it either becomes an issue they raise against the company itself or, worst case scenario, they become complacent because it becomes the norm for it to be misused.