It seems common for people to assume that privacy is about hiding something. Most people close the door when they're using a toilet in a public place. Is it because they have something to hide? Or is it that they want some privacy?
Privacy can be about hiding things, but it's also about space and boundaries. I want to have some control over who gets to know me, and how intimately.
So much of the "I have nothing to hide" retort misses the fact that it isn't about big secrets, but rather a collection of little secrets (if you want to call them that - they are just facts that are sensitive).
Less about are you planning to violently overthrow the United States Government. More about what genre of porn do you like to entertain yourself with.
These little things can be used against you. We all have them.
So I take it you would be fine with sharing all of your credit card and location history for the past 10 years with at least 5000 people you've never met?
When I do give out my CC data I do this voluntarily and make an active decision each time to do so. I'm NOT giving it out to random people, some of which might be fraudsters
Everyone I know who hates this stuff says so on the edge of normal conversations, couched in a wait-and-see vibe. Google Home gifts go unopened and tech devices are excluded from certain areas.
This is exactly what happened. Five years ago, I got sick of being called a conspiracy theorist, shut my mouth, and focused on my own privacy.
Now the public generally seems to have a sense of what's happened to privacy, but has given up do to the upkeep required to avoid our ubiquitous surveillance machine.
The people in my circle who still think there's hope won't buy smart devices, but won't go further, because to do so would lock them out of large chunks of modern society, or require them to maintain a level of technical skill and perform certain kinds of upkeep which would disadvantage them in the long run.
The world's complex, many of us are living at the margins of insolvency. The bandwidth required to fight the panopticon is too damn high, and unless done very well, only produces a moral victory ('I'm fighting the system as best I can').
